[1][2] He graduated from Balliol College, Oxford University, with a double first in Engineering, and then worked as a surveyor on the Great Barrier Reef from 1928 to 1929 and in East Greenland in 1932 and 1933.
In the late 1930s the artist Nancy Sharp (the first wife of William Coldstream and the lover of Louis MacNeice), fell in love with Spender.
[3][4] Spender was regarded as arrogant and tactless,[2] and he had a difficult relationship with his brother, Stephen.
On 3 May 1945 Michael was a passenger in an Avro Anson aircraft, and he was seriously injured when it crashed near Süchteln in Germany; he died on 5 May.
Stephen was deeply affected, and he wrote the elegy Seascape for his brother.