The Neglected Poetry E-Book

Maria Luisa González Biosca

• Herausgeber: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: English In The World Series
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 428

Beschreibung

This book collects for the first time a compendium of poems written in English by brigadists, sanitary personnel and journalists that participated or were involved in the Spanish Civil War, as well as by intellectuals, writers and journalists that supported the republican cause from the outside. The anthology starts from a previous historical framework in which this poetic legacy has been contextualized, to know where, when, how and why these poems were written, and who wrote them or who were their protagonists. All these analyses have served to understand the causes of why this poetic legacy has been denied and has not received the recognition it deserves today.

Leseprobe

The Neglected Poetry

ENGLISH IN THE WORLD SERIES

GENERAL EDITOR

Antonia Sánchez MacarroUniversitat de València, Spain

ADVISORY EDITORIAL BOARD

Professor Enrique BernárdezUniversidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

Professor Anne BurnsMacquarie University, Sydney, Australia

Professor Angela DowningUniversidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

Dr Martin HewingsUniversity of Birmingham, Great Britain

Professor Ken HylandUniversity of East Anglia, Norwich, Great Britain

Professor James LantolfPenn State University, Pennsylvania, USA

Professor Michael McCarthyUniversity of Nottingham, Great Britain

Professor Eija VentolaUniversity of Helsinki, Findland

© Maria Luisa Gonzalez Biosca© 2019 by the Universitat de València

Design and typeset: Celso Hdez. de la FigueraCover design by Pere Fuster (Borràs i Talens Assessors SL)Cover image: Intérprete Salomon escribiendo a máquina. Aragón 1938© (Archivo Fotográfico AABI)

ISBN: 978-84-9134-472-8

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Photographs

Illustrations

Introduction

Preliminary

1 First Clues

1.1. The Beginning

1.2. Development of the Research

1.3. Selection of the Poets from the XV International Brigade

1.4. Selection of the Retrospective Poets

1.5. Selection of the Poets who supported the Spanish Republic from Abroad

2 The Intervention of the International Brigades:The Answer to a False Agreement of Non-Intervention

2.1. The World-Wide Political Scenario

2.2. The Diplomatic Trench

2.3. Let Who is Free of Sin Throw the First Stone

2.4. The International Brigades Stand Up for the Spanish Republic: The Answer to a Farce

2.5. Knowing the XV Brigade: Who were they?

2.6. After the Battle: The Withdrawal of the Volunteers

3 A Sea of Papers: The International Press in The Spanish War

3.1. The War Correspondents

3.2. The Press of the International Brigades in English

4 Literary Influences

4.1. The Impact of the First World War Poetry on the Brigadists

4.2. Influence of Imagism and Aesthetic Currents of the Early Decades of the 20th Century

4.3. Overview of some Canonical Poets’ Influence on this Poetic Legacy

5 Anthology and Stylistic Analysis

5.1. Corpus of the Brigadist Group and Stylistic Analyses

5.2. Corpus of the Retrospective Group and Stylistic Analyses

5.3. Corpus of the Abroad Group and Stylistic Analyses

6 Conclusion

7 Bibliography

7.1. Cited and Complementary Readings

7.2. Literary Webpages

7.3. Libraries and Newspaper Archives

7.4. Photographic Archives

7.5. Miscellaneous

Annex: Biographical Notes on the Poets and Information about the Publication Dates of the Poems

Brigadist group

Retrospective group

Abroad group

Acknowledgements

First of all, I would like to show my appreciation to the person who woke my interest in poetry, Peter Vickers, who had been my teacher of Phonology at the University of Valencia. I had asked him about some poets for a literary paper and then he suggested poets from the First World War. Peter recited Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting” by heart. I can still hear the echo of his voice.

I would also like to thank Concha de Sena, the person who put me in touch with Dr. Antonia Sánchez Macarro, a lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Valencia, who I am grateful to for her guidance and advice in the early stages of my research. My greatest thanks, however, go to Dr. Juan José Martínez Sierra who was enthusiastic about my research project since the very first moment I presented it to him, and who encouraged me to compile this Anthology.

This Anthology owes its origin to a research project that took nearly four intensive years of research, preparation, deceptions and enlightenments, but eventually I believe it has led to fruitful work.

I sincerely appreciate all the unnamed people in the archives and libraries who have kindly helped me.

To my daughter Aitana and her father Francisco

IN SPAIN, and almost only in Spain, there still lives a spirit to resist the bureaucratic tyranny of the State and the intellectual intolerance of all doctrinaires. For that reason, all poets must follow the course of this struggle with open and passionate partisanship.

Herbert Read supports the Spanish Republicin the survey Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War (1937)

If we are to preserve the heritage of our fathers, we must be prepared to fight as the gallant loyalists of Spain fought and died, holding back with their bodies and blood for two and a half years the flood of barbarism that swept over Europe until they succumbed to the strange indifference of democratic nations in whose defense they were valiantly fighting. World War II began in Spain 1936.

Claude G. Bowers,former Ambassador of the United States of America in Spain1933-1939.My Mission to Spain. Watching The Rehearsal for World War TwoNew York, November 1953 (foreword vi)

Photographs

Photograph 1. The Canadian Dr. Norman Bethune set up the Servicio Canadiense de Transfusiones de Sangre in December 1937. He led his refrigerated field ambulance to the dressing stations at the frontline, to perform preserved blood transfusions to the wounded soldiers. Dr. Bethune poses besides the ambulance in Valencia. <http://www.canadainternational.gc.ca/spainespagne/media/bethune_photos_hd.aspx?lang=spa>.

Photgraph 2. Major Robert Merriman Chief of Staff of the 15th International Brigade, Mars 1938. Photograph by Harry Randall: XV IB Photograf Collection. ALBA Photo 11-0122. The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York.

Photgraph 3. Philip Lucas Detro, Battalion Commander, Lincoln-Washington Novemver 1937. Photograph by Harry Randall: XV IB Photograf Collection. ALBA Photo 11-0608. The Tamiment Library and Robert F.Wagner Labor Archives, New York.

Photograph 4. A break, December 1937. John Hunter, member of the machine gun company num. 1 of the Lincoln-Washington. Battalion. Photograph by Harry Randall: XV IB Photograph Collection. ALBA Photo 11-0639. The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, NewYork.

Photograph 5. Transportation of the anti-tank battery in Ambite, September, 1937. Harry Randall: XV IB Photograph Collection, n° 1233. ALBA Photo. The Tammiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive. New York.

Photograph 6. Returning brigadists of the Lincoln Battalion aboard the City of Paris. Hank Rubin standing on the far left. Harold Hoff in the front row far left. Harold Hoff’s collection.

Photograph 7. George Green playing the cello in the interior patio at Huete Hospital (Cuenca). Behind, playing the accordion, Nan Green, his wife and the brigade and German violinist Willi Remmel. Spanish Collection, 32/4/9a. Courtesy Marx Memorial Library & Workers’School, London Foundation.

Photograph 8. Sitting, Monks is the first on the left (Monks, 2012).

Photograph 9. The Republican Government set up an education program for refugee children at Benicassim. Some of these schools were supporterd by international aid and the International Brigades. Photograph taken by Alec Wainman, © The Estate of Alexander Wheeler Wainman, John Alexader Wainman (Serge Alternês), IWM, London, ref. HU33021.

Photograph 10. British nurses of the British Medical Unit at the Poleniño Hospital, (Salas Franco, 2011: 78).

Illustrations

Illustration 1. Pencil sketch of David Lomon drawn by Clive Branson. Clive Branson Collection. Courtesy, Marx Memorial Library & Workers’School, London Foundation.

Illustration 2. Periodical of the XV International Brigade, The Volunteer for Liberty. CRAI, Archive Pavelló de la República.

Illustration 3. Newspaper of the XV International Brigade, The Volunteer for Liberty. Library-newspaper archive Conde Duque, Madrid, microfilm section, film reel 1052/87.

Illustration 4. Poem published in The Volunteer for Liberty, II, 6, Barcelona. February 19, 1938, two weeks before his death during the Aragon retreats.

Illustration 5. The retreats from Aragón’s front, March-April 1938. Bessie (2002).

Illustration 6. Joseph Selligman’s death certificate. RGASPI, Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History. Fond 545/Opis 6/ Delo 985 / p. 7.

Illustration 7. Document property of the author.

Illustration 8. Newspaper of the XVth International Brigade, The Volunteer for Liberty. Library-newspaper archive Conde Duque, Madrid, microfilm section, film reel 1052/87.

Illustration 9.The Volunteer for Liberty. CRAI Archive Pavelló de la República, Barcelona. SCW, publications, V6.

Illustration 10. RGASPI, Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, Moscow. Fond 545/Opis 2/Delo 58 p. 25.

Illustration 11. Loyalist army and rebel army positions sketch by Monks (Monks, 2011: 130).

Illustration 12. The newspaper of the brigade, The Volunteer for Liberty. Library-newspaper archive Conde Duque, Madrid, microfilm section, film reel 1052/87.

Illustration 13. Cartoon drawn by Deyo Jacobs, American brigadist of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. Deyo Jacobs illustrates an article by Herbert Kline published in the same issue in The New Masses in July 20, 1937. <https://www.unz.org/Pub/NewMasses-1937jul20-00005?View=PDF>.

Illustration 14. Map of the area controlled by the Lincoln Brigade June 10, 1937. Extracted from The Book of the XV Brigade (Graham, 1974: 69).

Illustration 15. The poem was published three months after the invasion and occupation of Asturias by the rebel army and its allies, the Legion Condor and the Italian fascist troops.

Illustration 16.Boletín de Información de las Brigadas Internacionales, mimeographed in the Jarama trenches. Newspaper archive of Valencia.

Illustration 17.News Bulletin of the International Brigades, mimeographed in the Jarama trenches. Newspaper library of Valencia.

Preliminary. The Neglected Poetry

The First World War was the last European war which was only fought on the battlefield. Eight million soldiers died and there were six million disabled. During the inter-war years, the time between the Great War and the Second World War, there was another war in Europe, called the Spanish Civil War.

The Spanish war was considered an isolated conflict during this twenty-one-year parenthesis of relative peace in a Europe that had made room for four dictators: Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar and Joseph Stalin. The Second World War involved more countries than the First World War; its duration and the use of massive new military technology caused nearly seventy million deaths. The First World War lasted four years and took place mainly in the trenches. There were periods when the front stayed in the same position for at least a year. This prolonged wait was sometimes filled with the writing of spontaneous poems or verses which collected the soldiers’ feelings about their experiences at the front. The majority of the soldiers lacked primary studies and there was a high percentage of illiteracy which made it difficult for them to write poems. Nevertheless, there was an important amount of poems written in English (as well as in other languages) by Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Thomas, Graves and so on. The majority of them would not be known until many years later because most of their works were not published regularly until the mid-twenties. However, when their poems were released, given their literary and historic value, the poets were not neglected for having participated in that war. Neither their pacifist ideology, nor their satirical themes were marginalised and nowadays they are considered canonical poets in the English language.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out, in spite of the enduring work of the Pedagogical Missions and the impulse for public schooling during the Republic, the illiteracy rate among the native population was extremely high. Langston Hughes explained this in his book Escritos sobre España (2011). For example, he said that the kitchen head at the Albacete base had problems to make the kitchen work, because what the brigadists wanted was to fight, not to cook, and the majority of the Spaniards could neither read, nor understand the orders, nor the menus.

This has meant a double task for Louis who speaks little Spanish. He evidently depends on an interpreter. However as many of the kitchen workers did not know how to read nor write, writing down the orders and making lists of menus was impossible at the beginning.

Out of 27 cooks and helpers, only 7 knew how to read and write and therefore, Louis organised classes for them. After five months seventeen have really learned to read in their own language, Spanish. Due to this achievement, the U.G.T trade union, to which the kitchen workers belong to, have congratulated Louis in an official letter. (Hughes et al., 2011:80, the translation is ours).

During the war and in spite of the difficult conditions, the Alliance of the Antifascist Intellectuals for the Defence of Culture, in which the majority of the poets from the Generation of ‘27 participated, developed a project of literary diffusion which materialised in El Mono Azul,1 among other activities.

At the same time, and this being a fundamental question for the anthology, the government, different cultural associations, trade unions, political parties, and military units also edited their own monthly, weekly, or daily publications.

As a consequence of the proposal of the agreement of non-intervention 2and the large scale military collaboration between the European fascist powers, and the Moroccan Legion, supporting the rebels, the International Communist, at the request of Joseph Stalin, organised the formation of the International Columns after September 1936 (Castells, 1974: 56). The French Communist Party (FCP), led by André Marty, carried out the recruiting and organization. Many of the volunteers who joined came from countries with dictatorships, such as Germany or Italy, but the majority came from democratic countries, such as France, England, Ireland, Belgium, the United States, Argentina and Chile, among others. However, not all the brigadists were Stalinists, as Casanova states, “There were a good many in the Brigades who were Stalinists, especially at the organisational level, but there were thousands who were not” (2010: 95).

The volunteers of the International Brigades came spontaneously to defend the Spanish Republic because of their ideals of solidarity; many of them sacrificed their lives for the Republic’s defamed right of self-defence because they knew that, what was at stake in Spain was the liberty of the entire world.

The birth of the brigades cannot be understood without the existence of the Non-Intervention Committee that had blocked Democratic Spain. Confronted with all the evidence of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s tangible support to Franco, the Republic declared that the neighbouring countries hid behind the hypocrisy of the words “the keeping of world peace” to disguise the reality of the facts: the breaking of all the previous agreements of collaboration of mutual help among democratic countries, with France and Great Britain as their head (Núñez, 2004: 121, the translation is ours).

The International Brigades were consolidated into five brigades; the XV was the English speaking brigade, mainly formed by English, Irish, Canadian, American and Australian brigade memebers.

The volunteers from the working class had a tradition of writing poetry, given that the leftist publications in England or Ireland promoted the publication of stories and poems about their personal experiences (Jump, 2006: 15). Different from the recruited men in the First World War, these men formed part of the first literate worker generation (Jump, 2006: 15). Newspapers, such as New Writing, Left Review or Poetry and the People, encouraged the writers and poets mainly from the working class to publish poetry. Continuing that blossoming tradition, any volunteer brigadist could feel free to express an idea or a feeling without feeling inhibited for not being a professional writer. Some of these poems were published in The Volunteer for Liberty, the XV International Brigade’s weekly paper written in English and edited in Madrid from February until March 1938, when the publisher moved to Barcelona because of the development of the war. The majority of the XV International Brigade poetry was practically unknown. Only the names and the works by John Cornford, Stephen Spender and Charles Donnelly, writers who enlisted in the International Brigades, were known.

The brigadists, who fought for the defence of the Republican cause, left a valuable testimonial legacy in which the poetry that was written in the battlefield stands out.

Nevertheless, the subsequent war development, with the Second World War following the Spanish War and after this the Cold War,3 had negative repercussions on this legacy, since one of the consequences was the global polarization into two main political blocks, one communist and the other, capitalist. Sectarianism imposed the rules of the game. Everything related to communism or leftist issues was instantly attacked, chased or ignored in the capitalist sphere. The same thing happened in the communist countries regarding the countries under the influence of capitalism.

1El Mono Azul was a magazine published on the Loyalist side during the Spanish Civil War under the auspices of the Alliance of Antifascists Intellectuals.

2 The Committee of Non-Intervention, promoted by the French Government at the beginning of the war, ended with an agreement which was signed in London on the 3rd of September of 1937. Twenty-seven countries, including the great European powers, signed a pact in which they committed themselves not to get involved in the Spanish War.

3 The Cold War was a historic period of tension between the capitalist block, with United States as head, and the communist bloc, headed by the USSR, which lasted from 1945 to 1991. Its origin was the end of the Second World War, and it was called this because no war between these nations was started, probably because of the fear of a nuclear war. During this conflict two wars occurred where both powers directly or indirectly intervened: Korea (1950-1953) and Vietnam (1964-1975).

IntroductionJustification for the Anthology

Nancy Cunard, helped by W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender, carried out a survey among the English and Irish writers to know who supported the legal government of the Republic, who did not, and who did not choose either of the two options. The survey was named Authors Take Sides On the Spanish War and its results were published in Left Review in 1937.

Thanks to initiatives like Cunard’s, poetry was written in English from Canada, England, Ireland, Australia, and evidently, also from other countries and in other languages. This poetry had two clear functions: on the one hand to defend the Spanish democracy, and, on the other, to let the citizens from those countries know that, in spite of the non-intervention agreement, an invasion, supporting the rebel’s coup d’état, was being carried out by Nazi and Fascist Italian troops. The function of this poetry was evidently used as propaganda:

The immense majority of writers, as is known, adheres to the cause of the young Spanish Republic, although voices which celebrated the coup d’état were not lacking- the most notorious case, not only for the large amount of verses, which were dedicated to it, but also for the undisputable quality of some of them, is that of the South African poet Roy Campbell. The ideological answer is heterogeneous among the committed or sympathizers writers of the Spanish Republic, as diverse as the mosaic of forces of the “Spanish labyrinth” (Álvarez & López, 1986: 5, the translation is ours).

Regarding the poems written by the brigadists during the war in Spain, the references to the territory where the war was fought were fundamental and continuous: the trenches, the bombed cities, the ambulances, the hospitals and so on. The temporal axis corresponded to that of the brigades during the civil war, from their arrival in Spain at the end of summer in 1936, until their departure in November 1938. This poetry, as Álvarez & López (2006) indicate, did not have the function of propaganda or, at least, not at first. The experience and the reality of the war did not admit its idealization, nor its violence, although the brigadists fought for and vindicated ideals:

Paradoxically, we find the most intimate notes and a language with smaller doses of political propaganda, especially in the writings of the poets who fought in Spain. On the other hand, the verses with the largest ideological accent were produced far from the battlefronts. The poetry by “poets in uniform” generally springs from their own experiences in the trenches; they know “blood and death,” and do not admit the heroic touches, nor the idealization of violence which usually decorates the propagandistic poetry (Álvarez & López, 1986: 6, the translation is ours).

This research extends the scope of this poetic legacy and, apart from analysing the poems included in the anthology more in depth, it also includes a subgroup of poems written by brigadists who wrote them after going back to their countries; this subgroup is called Retrospective, and poems written by those poets who supported the Spanish Republic from abroad, most of whom were canonical poets at that time; that was the case of Wallace Stevens or Cecil Day-Lewis. Therefore, as it will be seen, we have classified the poems according to spatial criteria regarding those poems written in Spain or written from abroad, and temporal criteria, during or after the war.

Poems for Spain was the first anthology published in 1939 by Stephen Spender and John Lehman. In 1964, Robert Skelton published an anthology under the name Poetry of the Thirties, where there is a chapter dedicated to a few poets who supported the Spanish Republic and to some brigadists. As far as the United States was concerned, in 1965 Ford published a monographic study of this poetry, but as the title A Poet’s war: British Poets and the Spanish Civil War indicates, American poets were not included in this anthology. This may be due to the fact that the United States was at the height of the persecution of leftist intellectuals, known as The Witch Hunt, headed by the republican senator Arthur McCarthy. Ford gave an accurate account of some canonical poets, such as W.H. Auden, Herbert Read, Stephen Spender and many other poets of the 1920s and 1930s, even those from the First World War. He did likewise with the brigadists such as John Cornford, Christopher Caudwell, Julian Bell and so on.

The year 1966 was when John M. Muste published Say that we saw Spain to Die: Literary Consequences of the Spanish Civil war. The author reviewed the literature from the Spanish Civil War. He commented on some poems written by the volunteers, like John Cornford, Stephen Spender and Edwin Rolfe, and supporters, such as Margot Heinemann and W. H. Auden. In 1969, Maxwell reviewed the poets of the 1930s and published Poets of the Thirties. Three brigadists were studied: Christopher Caudwell, John Cornford, and Stephen Spender, who already was a canonical poet; and two canonical poets who took side for the Spanish Republic, Daniel Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice.

Valentine Cunningham published Spanish Civil War Verse in 1980, an anthology that contained many previously unpublished poems. This anthology not only included poems written by British poets, but also included letters, press articles, personal memoirs, and Spanish poems translated into English. As Cunningham indicates there are several factors which make this anthology special:

Special too, about this collection are the previously unpublished things it contains: Several poems by Miles Tomalin; several by Clive Branson, among them his unique concentration camp verses… My Introduction is also the first account of this War’s relation to English literature that’s been able to draw on the valuable new Archive of the International Brigade… For one prime intention of this anthology is to put firmly the work of those undeservedly too-little known poets Charles Donnelly, Ewart Milne, Clive Branson, Tom Wintringham and Miles Tomalin. Another is to reveal the considerable (in every sense) extent of Stephen Spender’s contribution, in verse and prose, to the literature of Spain (1980: 16-17).

In the United States in 2002, Cary Nelson published an anthology that assembled poems written by American volunteers, some poems of supporters and others written by late contributors. In 2006, a British brigadist’s son, Jim Jump, published the last anthology written by British and Irish brigadists who volunteered for the Loyal Spanish front, Poems from Spain.

There are also two anthologies published in Spain, one bilingual by Álvarez & López in 1986 Poesia Anglo-Americana de la Guerra Civil Española and another in Spanish by Montero (AABI) in 2001, Voluntarios de la libertad. In 1981, Bernd Dietz published a monograph under the title El Impacto de la Guerra Civil Española en la Poesía Inglesa (1936-1939).

The poetry from the First World War impacted the brigadists, due to the fact that some of them were sons or relatives of soldiers who had fought in that war. That was the case of John Cornford, whose father had fought in the First World War and, in the case of Captain Thomas Wintringham, he himself had fought.

The consultation of primary sources for evidence on original works, such as biographies, diaries and memoirs, photos, letters and so on written by the brigadists or war correspondents, referring to their daily routine during the war, will be crucial for our research in order to connect this legacy to the social context where the poets lived and to explore the complex set of factors that determined the commitment they held, either as participants or supporters.

Looking back

This anthology has taken into account the considerations stated by Álvarez & López (1986) about the differences between the poetry written by the brigadists and the one by poets who supported the Spanish Republic from abroad.

Using field research techniques was indispensable to gather data to contribute additionally to the study of this poetic legacy by, firstly, developing an insightful stylistic analysis of the poems in order to understand the interaction between the poems, their authors and audience and, secondly, focusing on the criteria employed to select the poems, singling out their structure and poetical devices, themes and tone.

I would also like to show that the tone of some of these poems written abroad is different from those based on personal war experience, because they had been written mainly as propaganda to collect money, food and other goods needed by the Spanish Republic, or to prompt governments to repeal the non-intervention agreement.

Reading the first-hand testimonies found in the poems written by the three groups of poets help me to elucidate and understanding some of the reasons behind the fact that this poetic legacy has been neglected and is still neglected today

As mentioned in the Preliminary, Álvarez & López (2006) considered some differences between the poetry written by the brigadists and the one by poets who supported the Spanish Republic from abroad. Their anthology opened a door for future research, therefore, I found this anthology inspiring and understood it as an invitation to deepen the study of this legacy.

Thus, the present anthology substantiates not only those differences, but also the similarities between the three groups of poets; that are, the Brigadists, Retrospective and Abroad groups.

Following this, the poetic legacy gathered in the anthology is firsthand evidence of the reality, on one hand, based on the direct war experience of the brigadists and, on the other, on the direct experience of the viewer from abroad. Although each group through their poets was analysed through their poems separately, at the same time, I approached them as a whole, as a single voice which would make the poems alive again, the testimony of their memories

1

First Clues

1.1. The Beginning

The study and analysis of the International Brigadists’ poetry was born as a project which had to follow some principles and a specific methodology to become an academic investigation. The first phase, which I never imagined would be so arduous, consisted of collecting all the material and, at the same time, following the objectives of the investigation; I studied and approached the historical causes which gave rise to the formation of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War.

The investigation began with two fundamental books. The first one is Los brigadistas de habla inglesa en la Guerra Civil Española written by Rodríguez Celada, González de la Aleja and Pastor García (2006). The book, as its title indicates, reviews the literature written in English during the Spanish Civil War. What was most interesting for our research are the bibliographic sources which are used and which helped us to find poets and poems written during the period of the conflict on Spanish soil. The second book is a bilingual anthology edited in 1986 by Álvarez Rodríguez and López Ortega, Poesia Anglo-Norteamericana de la Guerra Civil Española. This book did not have a bibliography. Therefore, I could not find the origin of the untitled poem written by the American brigadist, Joseph Selligman. My interest in this poem was personal since the first time I read it, because I noticed that its refrain and the narration echoed the poem written by Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1854). I only found this information in The Last Great Cause, a book written by Stanley Weintraub in 1968, a study about the literature written by the Americans involved in the Spanish war.

The next steps were the searches for more data, personal memoirs and photographs through anthologies, literary magazines published by brigadists, internet sources and websites, biographies, catalogues, libraries, battlefields and museum websites, as for example, the Imperial War Museum, among others.

I contacted the Asociación de Amigos de las Brigadas Internaciones in Madrid by telephone and Severiano Montero, the president of the association at that time, answered my questions about a topic which was new for me. I wondered where they had fought, and if they had been in the trenches for long periods of time. Severiano Montero, a scholar of history and professor, suggested that I participate in the guided marches to the battlefields where the brigadists had fought. He also told me to visit the Conde Duque Newspaper Library in Madrid, where microfilmed diaries of The Volunteer for Liberty, published from February 1937 until February 1938, are preserved on microfilm.

Reading those old periodicals published at that time in English in a country, where the majority of the population was illiterate, was an emotional moment of the research. Then, my field work continued when I rang the newspaper library of the Pavellón de la República which belongs to the University of Barcelona and, fortunately, the archivist confirmed there were some issues of the The Volunteer for Liberty. However, the archivist told me I needed a letter of presentation from the dean of the University of Valencia to have access to the newspapers. Other places, such as the Humanities Library at the Valencia University, the newspaper library in Valencia, the newspaper library of the Ateneo Mercantil and the Institute Française of Valencia, were very useful. One of the most interesting archives that I worked with through the Internet is the Abraham Lincoln Brigades Archive in New York, where there is a great deal of official and personal data about the American brigadists.

Other valuable sources of first-hand information were the diaries, biographies or novels written by brigadists, where they relate their memories, and the ones written by war correspondents that tell a great deal about their experiences and implications with the “causa.” Many war correspondents, such as Martha Gelhorn, Virginia Cowles, Sefton Delmer, Josephine Herbst, Ernest Hemmingway, Langston Hughes, Charly Buckley, Herbert Mathews and John Whitaker spoke clearly about the facts of the war where they lived close to the fighting. Their vision of the personal tragedies of the brigadists, the popular army and the Spanish civilians reflected the professionalism of the good journalists who wrote what they saw without being afraid of the threat of censorship and its consequences because they were observers, journalists and protagonists all at the same time.

Even though I found books in the archives they were not sufficient enough for the investigation. Therefore, it was necessary to look for and buy all the anthologies, and most of the personal memoirs, essays, criticisms, biographies and history books on the Internet and from abroad. Sometimes there were handicaps because some books did not arrive on time, others were out of print and I had to look for them in other places. I had to reorder books and cancel other orders. Finally, I was able to compile a great deal of information to be able to carry out the research.

Another helpful source of information has been Ray Hoff, the son of Harold Hoff, an American brigadist of the XV Brigade. Ray sent me a facsimile of all the issues of The Volunteer of Liberty. He also sent other documents about the brigades, poems, pictures, and letters and has always been willing to help in any way possible.

1.2. Development of the Research

Taking into account that this chapter also deals with the necessary field work for the qualitative research, the methodology depended to a large extent on the knowledge of the historical context to which the brigadists belonged, and the consequences that the Spanish war had on their lives. The normal day-to-day routine of millions of citizens was interrupted by the coup d’état led by a group of rebel generals against the legality of the Spanish Republic government. The experience of the war is reflected in their poetry; they were involved in events that would change their lives forever. The worldwide scenario was changing dramatically during the Spanish Civil War, so, the intellectuals from abroad, who supported the Spanish Republic, answered the tragic appeal of Spain with their poetry.

A comparison between the legacy of the poetry written by the three groups will helped to single out what issues and aesthetic currents influenced these poets. Visiting natural scenarios, such as Belchite, Benicàssim, Brunete or Jarama, where the brigadists fought and that inspired most of the poetry they wrote, a part of the global process of the qualitative research of how things took place and how they progressed. Therefore, I visited some of the battlefields and places where events occurred. I also had the opportunity to listen to the experiences of some brigadists through the testimony of their children, Raymond Hoff and James Neugass, the sons of Harold Hoff and James Neugass, both of them members of the XV Brigade.

One of the most touching moments of the research was during the homage in November 2012 to the International Brigades at the Complutense University in Madrid, one of the first places where the brigadists defended the city from the attacks of the rebels. There I introduced myself to one of the last British brigadists who was still alive, David Lomon. I thanked him for what he had done for my country, Spain. Then he held my hand, put it against his chest and said, “You do not have to thank me. I did it because it came from my heart.” After the homage, I interviewed him, and I also asked about Clive Branson, another brigadist who had been captured with him by the Italian fascist infantry during the retreats in March, 1938, after the fall of Belchite. Both of them had been sent to the concentration camp of San Pedro de Cardeña in Burgos, where Branson had written poems and made sketches of the brigadist prisoners. Then David remembered that Branson had made a charcoal portrait of him. This picture is presently at the Max Memorial Library in London. David Lomon died a few weeks later.

1.3. Selection of the Poets from the XV International Brigade

Traditionally, poetry has been used as propaganda of war with the intention to gain support of the people, and that was what the Spanish Republic needed in order to collect funds for the refugees, food, medicines and other supplies for the Spanish people. Thanks to the initiative by Nancy Cunard to publish the survey “Are you for or against the war?” in 1937, many poems from Canada, England, Ireland, and also from the United States were published in favour of the Spanish Republic. This made the Spanish “causa” very popular around the world. It also helped the citizens to be aware of what really was happening with the agreement of non-intervention. The questionnaire explained that the agreement was a farce, because two of the nations that had already signed it, Germany and Italy, had invaded Spain and supported the rebel General Francisco Franco.

The corpus of poets chosen is based on the experience the brigadists went through while serving on the Loyalist side. Poems written by the nurses and journalists, as for example, Langston Hughes, who had spent three months with the XV Brigade, were also included.

The continuous references to the land were crucial: the trenches, the anguish, the fear of death, the blitzed cities, the hospital, the ambulance, etc. This poetry, mainly based on personal experience of the war, did not idealize it, although the poets defended the fight for their ideals.

1.4. Selection of the Retrospective Poets

The first selection of poetry written by brigadists, nurses and journalists who were involved in the war, has been extended with the poems written by those who wrote them after the end of the war. As mentioned before, I have called this group Retrospective Poets.

Therefore, I decided to separate this group from the one of the brigadists, because their poems were written after they had returned to their countries. These poems echo their remembrances of the war. Some were written while the war was still in progress and others were written many years later.

1.5. Selection of the Poets who supported the Spanish Republic from Abroad

As I have already mentioned in the introduction, this third group of poets, who for different reasons supported the loyalist side of the Spanish struggle with their poetry, left an important legacy. There were poets both from Europe and from America and Canada. The selection of these poets has been made from different newspapers and anthologies of poetry from the Spanish Civil War, some from the 1930s and some published more recently, as for example, the Anthology of American Poetry by Oxford University Press, published in 2006. Some authors were already canonical at that time; others were not recognized until a few years later.

As this anthology indicates, the poetry written by the Brigadist and Retrospective groups and the Abroad group that supported the Spanish Republic paid special attention to imagery and symbols, even though it was realistic poetry. The poets who wrote from abroad depicted the striking crudeness of war by combining simple vocabulary and, in some cases, complex diction. It was a poetry which focused on propaganda, as it wanted citizens of other countries to open their eyes to the advance of fascism. On the other hand, the poetry of the Brigadists and Retrospective groups conveyed the reality of a shock-force soldier with his own fears, feelings and hopes; thus, they also used plain diction to describe specific moments and situations. They did not use extra words, just the necessary ones to reflect their emotions and the intensity of war. By contrast, even though the supporters used simple language as well, we can extract from the reading of the poems, that their language was more rhetorical and enveloping; sentences were complex and longer.

Reading the poems aloud again and again, recording, listening and reading them again was the technique I used to grasp the iambs, rhyme and the intensity of the poems. Many poems were written in free verse; however, classical types also abound, as the sonnet, elegy, apostrophe and classical stanza, like the heroic quatrain. A classic device of Georgian and Pastoral poetry profusely used by these poets is the capital letter at the beginning of each line of the poem.

The interpretation is another step where I entered the creation of the poem to discover its message through the understanding of the elements of the lyric, such as, lyrical object, theme, tone, attitude and speaker or persona, who sometimes acts as the voice of the poet, but other times is the voice of the protagonist.

Spiegelman explains how to listen to the poems; the rhythm, rhyme and the words all create an effect on the meaning of the poem and, since this is war poetry, the reader can hear the sounds of war: the bombs, the explosions, the shouting, the confusion. In “Lecture Five” the author deals with metaphor and metonymy, which are poetic devices used extensively in figurative language to enhance what the poets are saying in order to give the reader more impact.

2

The Intervention of the International Brigades: The Answer to a False Agreement of Non-Intervention

2.1. The World-Wide Political Scenario

The decade of the 1930s endured an economic depression preceded by the strain of the First World War. The scenario of disenchantment and social marginalization, that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929, created the beginning of the ten-year Great Depression that generated huge rates of unemployment. It penetrated into the most unfortunate classes and caused the loss of property and capital in the upper and middle classes.

A couple of years before the beginning of the Spanish war, Edna St. Vincent Millay stated her pessimism about the social conditions and the political situation of those years in her poem “Apostrophe to a Man”:

In 1934, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote Apostrophe to Man, a poem of unmitigated pessimism and scorn. Her line Put death on the market, echoed the anger after World War I at the so-called war profiteers who had supplied shoddy materials to armies at vast profit. Millay’s disgust with the false patriotism used to promote war reflected her desire for radical reform along with many of the intellectuals and artists in America, especially in her Greenwich Village political and cultural circles. Their ideas for social changes will result in their strong support for the Republican side in the coming war in Spain (Sheldon, 1999: 78).

Consequently, poverty and hunger helped to spread fascism and racism in Europe as well as in the United States. Then, the social impact of the Depression of the thirties turned left political movements towards Communism, a doctrine that was seen as a new social model which could develop a more equalitarian society; its principles were based on Marxism, a political ideology that also exerted its literary influence on new leftist poetry.

The point was that Capitalism versus Marxism put the reality of that hungry and angry decade into words. The left-wing poetry of the thirties found new inspiration in the labour problems, as well as racism did in the United States. Richard Wright was a black communist American poet, who belonged to the Chicago Black Renaissance. Wright joined the Chicago branch of the John Reed Club 1in 1933 and in 1937 he published a manifesto, Blueprint for Negro Writing. In Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance Butler states (2011: 349):

Blueprint for Negro Writing calls for a radically new form of Black American literature, which is centered on the actual experiences of the masses of black people using “channels of racial wisdom,” black folk art as it is expressed in the blues, spirituals and folktales. The essay also called for an end to the isolation of the earlier African American writers replacing it with a deeply social and political consciousness embedded in the responsibility to express “a collective sense of Negro life in America.”

Meanwhile in Great Britain, the inhabitants of the town Jarrow were enduring the consequences of the economic crisis of 1929. There were no jobs for coal and shipyard workers; therefore, they embarked on a great march against hunger, the Jarrow March. Two hundred unemployed workers from Jarrow, in County Durham, gathered in a crowd and took the road to London. Since the beginning of the crisis, a number of similar marches were held, but that of Jarrow has remained the most memorable in history; it became known as the Jarrow Crusade. The proletarian movements strongly influenced the poetry which was later written by the brigadists and the poets, who supported loyalist Spain from abroad, because the Spanish Republic had become a symbol of the class struggle.

At that time the United Kingdom was the first imperialist world power; half the world was ruled under the slavery of colonization. The next colonizing power was France. Therefore, these countries could not support the Spanish democracy; they could not support the freedom which they themselves denied to their colonies.

Langston Hughes, an American writer and war correspondent who worked for the Baltimore Afro-American, narrates in his memories I Wonder as I Wander, the encounter he had with a young negro at the beach of Valencia:

He was an African from Guinea on the west Coast, who had come to study in Spain before the war. He had enlisted in the People’s Army, he told me, but having been a university student, he was assigned to the officers’ school in Valencia to study for a commission. I asked this young African what he thought about the war. He said, “I hope the government wins because the new Republic stands for a liberal colonial policy with a chance for my people in Africa to become educated. On Franco’s side are the old dukes and counts and traders who had exploited the colonies so long, never giving us schools or anything else. (1993: 329).

Regarding Germany, after the Nazi party won the elections in 1933, the country massively extended its rearmament; the Nazi army occupied the Rhineland strip in March 1936. This remilitarization violated the terms of the Treaty of Versailles (Whitaker, 1943: 4). Conversely, Great Britain was doing the same as well, in spite of its politics of appeasement, among other things because it was not prepared to defend itself. As a colonial empire, it possessed a huge merchant fleet. However, the United Kingdom needed to gain time in order to manufacture modern weapons, such as aircraft bombers, antiaircraft batteries, surface ships, submarines and so on. The appeasement policy was the strategy which Great Britain followed, while Germany annexed Austria in March 1938. The same year, on September 30, the Munich Agreement reached by Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy, permitted Germany to annex the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia.

In this sense, the Field Marshal, the Viscount of Alanbrooke, wrote an autobiographical diary where he traced on paper what the situation of Great Britain was in September 1939:

When on September 3rd, 1939, Britain, carrying with her a deeply-divided and hesitant France, met Hitler’s invasion of Poland by war, the bulk of her Battle Fleet had been rearmed against air attack […] her Metropolitan Air Force, though still only a third of the size of the Luftwaffe, offered, in its small but superlative trained Fighter Command, some answer to the trump card of unopposed bombing with which for the past eighteen months Hitler had blackmailed Europe. For the first time, too, as a result of the rapid build-up of Anti-Aircraft Command, London and the principal ports and factory towns had some rudimentary ground defence against day bombardment from the air. (Bryant and Brooke, 1958: 41)

2.2. The Diplomatic Trench

At the beginning of the 1930s, the majority of the Spanish diplomacy, as well as that in other European countries, was represented by the aristocracy. However, with the arrival of the first Spanish Republic in 1931, the diplomatic career began to be professionalized. After the coup d’état conducted by the rebel generals, most of the Spanish diplomats sided with them, betraying their loyalty to the Spanish Republic. The answer of the Spanish Foreign Office was to defend the integrity and interests of the Spanish Republic in the trenches of diplomacy against the false agreement of non-intervention and its violation by Germany and Italy. According to Casanova (2010: 86-87):

To replace the disaffected diplomacy, it used distinguished intellectuals and university staff, almost all of them from the Socialist Party: the jurist Fernando de los Ríos, who had been a minister in the Republic between April 1931 and September 1933, was sent as ambassador to Washington; Doctor Marcelino Pascua to Moscow; the journalist Luis Araquistain to Paris; and Pablo de Azcárate, the only one who really had any experience in international diplomacy, was put in charge of the embassy in London.

Pablo de Azcárate was former Under-Secretary General of the League of Nations, Jurist consultant and Historian, and he had no political linkage to the Communist party. Azcárate served as ambassador of the Spanish Republic in London during the Spanish Civil War; he demonstrated with facts how the Nazi military intervention was not a mere drill of its weaponry; it occupied Spain by war and its alliance with the rebels gave them the victory against the Spanish Republic:

And on the 22nd of that same month the German Under-Secretary of State summed up the situation in a memorandum, referring to the petition that General Franco had sent to the German government at the beginning of October, for a significant amount of new war material (dealing with 50,000 rifles, 1,500 light machine guns, 500 heavy machine guns and 100 75mm tank gun pedestals), “do we want to try and help Franco until his final victory? Then he will need an even more important and superior military help than he is asking us for now. Does this deal with trying to keep Franco as equally supplied as the reds? In this case our help will also be necessary and the material that he asks for can be of great use. If our help to Franco is only going to be limited to the Condor legion, he will be able to intend another thing than any compromise with the reds.” (2012: 258, the translation is ours).

2.3. Let Who is Free of Sin Throw the First Stone

According to George Orwell, the fate of the Spanish Civil War was decided in London, Paris, Rome and Berlin, but, by no means, in Spain (Muste, 1966: 173). Orwell emphasized that the Spanish Republic was tied hands and feet because the agreement of non-intervention was a real intervention. By subjecting loyalist Spain to an arms embargo, the Spanish Republic was defenceless against the fascist powers which supplied everything that the rebel army asked for. The declaration of Herman Goering at the trial of Nuremberg illustrates this issue perfectly:

I urged Hitler to give support under all circumstances, firstly in order to prevent the further spread of Communism in that theatre and, secondly, to test my young Luftwaffe at this opportunity in this or that technical respect. With the permission of the Führer, I sent a large part of my transport fleet and a number of experimental fighter units, bombers and anti-aircraft guns; and in that way I had the opportunity to ascertain, under combat conditions, whether the material was equal to the task. In order that the personnel, too, might gather a certain amount of experience, I saw to it that there was a continuous flow, that is, that new people were constantly being sent and others recalled (Mombeek, Smith and Creek, 2001: 2).

The republican government had no other choice than to buy weapons from Russia, that did not begin to supply them until the middle of October 1936. The government had received rifles and machines guns from Mexico from the time of the revolution of Zapata, and they were not very useful, except as antiques.

In October 1936, the socialist Deputy of the Spanish Parliament, Luis Jiménez de Asúa, attended the Labour Party Conference in Edinburg. The title of his speech was “The Agony of Spain: Socialist Appeal to British Democracy”:2

In the papers this morning you will have read that there has been a terrible air bombardment by heavy bombers of the villages around Madrid. We could not stop that bombardment. Why? Because we had not the fighting aircraft to do it, because the Pact of Non-intervention has prevented us from getting them. What does it mean, the Pact of Non-Intervention? On the legal side-I’m a lawyer; I speak as a lawyer- on the legal side the Pact of Non-Intervention is a monstrosity. It has become the most powerful of interventions against the Government of Spain.