unwriting the good fight positioning, but other statements made in ‘Spain 1937’, that caused controversy.
Thereason for overlooking its complex stance and its even more complex and
quasi-philosophical underpinning with an ethical argument certainly lies in the
poem’s dense and often ambivalent, if not contradictory and paradoxical, imagery.
In all its complexity, though, the poem never forgets that it is a balancing act when
it comes to taking sides. The possible future under a liberal-democratic authority is
kitted out in nostalgic and very British middle-class images of walks, bicycle races,
and suburbia. There is even a lower-case ‘communion’, which implies both an
E. M. Forster-like message of ‘only connect’ and a vague return to religiosity. That
such visions of a potential future as regressive dreams of an idealized past are a
distraction in the present situation, however, is quickly made clear when the last
verse of stanza 20 reminds the reader that today is the time of struggle.
Stanza 21 of the poem attracted the most vociferous criticism, most famously
from George Orwell, for its line ‘The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary
murder’^21 (although Orwell also praised ‘Spain 1937’ as ‘one of the few decent
things that have been written about the Spanish war’^22 ). One can argue that Orwell’s
attack—on the grounds that this statement could only come from someone who
has never been in the position to kill another human being, in short, a poet
rather than a fighter—smacks of machismo. Indeed, it is a line in a poem in
poetic diction, and its superficial scandalousness rests in the fact that it describes
something seemingly unpoetic (although killing has fed innumerable poems) and,
worse, describes it neutrally. Yet when one goes back to the tone of the poem’s
initial section, whose emphasis on ‘Yesterday’ forms a structural bracket with the
‘To-morrow’ and ‘To-day’ of its penultimate fifth part, one simply finds the same
typically Audenesque attempt at detached and objective analysis. The scandal of the
second line of stanza 21 diminishes even further when one sees it as a follow-on
from its first line, which talks about the chances of death deliberately increasing
(amended to an inevitable increase later), a statement that is simply realistic.
Yet one can (and should) go further than that—and further than Auden himself
did, when he half-heartedly first changed the controversial expression in the second
verse to ‘the fact of murder’ (a revision that was retained by Auden’s editor Edward
Mendelson when he reprinted the poem in the posthumous collectionThe English
Auden) and then dropped ‘Spain 1937’ from his canon altogether. As part of the
poem’s intense discussion of ethics as a question of decisions and actions (rather
Frontism’, in David Garrett Izzo (ed.),W. H. Auden: A Legacy(West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill
Press, 2002), 240.
(^21) Auden,Spain(London: Faber, 1937), 11.
(^22) George Orwell famously wrote: ‘Mr Auden’s brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the
kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled’ (Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’,
inThe Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell,i:An Age Like This, 1920–1940,ed.
Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 516). It first appeared as a booklet of
its own entitledInside the Whale(London: Victor Gollancz, 1940). In this text, he expands an earlier
attack made inThe Adelphi, in Dec. 1938. See Mendelson,Early Auden, 321.