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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.

1 El 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).