unwriting the good fight the important literary models for Auden, did both. But what does one do with
awar that is only just about to become one, the civil strife in Spain that was
at the same time an internecine Spanish struggle for political supremacy and an
international conflict that attracted fighters from all over the world, and many
renowned ones from Britain? The international dimension of what could easily
have been a minor military coup in a then backward region of the world emerged
out of the symbolic view that the world outside Spain took of the conflict. To
many, right- and left-wingers alike, it seemed to spell the beginning of the final
polarization of world politics into fascism versus communism. To many British,
and to many British writers and artists, it appeared to put an end to the frustrating
stalemate of British politics, which, after a traumatic General Strike in 1926, had
veered neither towards the Left nor towards the Right, but remained stuck in what
appeared like middle-class complacency.
Auden, together with many others, now felt the need to rally round his new flag
of communism by not merely writing about the Spanish conflict from afar, but
by actually being there and becoming involved in it. It is one of many ironies in
Auden’s life that what had started out as an attempt at action once again quickly led
into writing. Useless as an ambulance driver, Auden’s services to the Republican
cause outside Valencia from mid-January to March 1937 were quickly utilized for
propaganda. Indeed, his very departure for Spain made it into the news pages of
the British press.^1 Recruited for radio broadcasts promoting the Republican cause
(he also wrote articles for theNew Statesman), he nonetheless quickly became
disaffected with the situation and returned to Britain after only a few weeks, having
initially intended to stay until summer.^2
‘Spain 1937’, quickly published by Faber in pamphlet form (asSpain)inMay
1937 with the explicit aim of raising money for Medical Aid for Spain,^3 is thus
from the start in an ambivalent position as a statement on the Spanish Civil War. It
hovers between specific propagandistic aim, general assessment, and personal note.
This complexity, if not confusion, has baffled not only its readers and critics.^4 It also
caused Auden’s own disaffection with the text and its subsequent disappearance
from the Auden canon. In what follows I will try to analyse in some depth how
contradictions and complexities emerge in the text—and whether they may be
regarded only as flaws or also as interventions in a debate on war that emerges from
the specific Spanish situation, but has implications beyond it.
The first aspect that strikes the reader of Auden’s poem is the surprising specificity
of its title. Its exact location in space and time is understandable in a poem that aims
(^1) See Humphrey Carpenter,W. H. Auden: A Biography(London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), 208:
‘‘‘famous poet to drive ambulance in spain’’, announced theDaily Workeron 12 January 1937.’
(^2) Carpenter states that Auden was already on his way back to Britain on 2 Mar. 1937 (ibid. 215).
(^3) See Rupert Davenport-Hines,Auden(London: Minerva, 1996), 166.
(^4) Even the apologetic Edward Mendelson calls the poem an example of ‘irresolution, set in a
political context’ with ‘damaging consequences’ (Edward Mendelson,Early Auden(London: Faber,
1981), 79).