In 1917 he served on the front line in France and began to write poems and letters about his experiences in the trenches.

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One manager she worked with took breaks to write humorous haiku poems about office life.

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But he continued to write and his novels, poems and essays and in his later years he was an outspoken critic of the Nigerian government.

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As for his writing, it passed from poems that had been an attempt to write some small and essentially truthful things out of the depths of himself (a self that was essentially unsure, tentative, indecisive) to often magisterial, and sometimes vapid prose: pronouncements upon the state of culture, and on how culture could stave off anarchy.

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When Spender himself published earlier editions of his collected poems, he was careful to edit out his immature work, and even to re-write pieces that his maturer self frowned upon.

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