stan smith
what was meant. The Civil War which began in July 1936 with General Franco’s
militaryrevolt against the newly electedPopular Front government rapidly became
an icon focusing all the contradictions and conflicts of the era. Rex Warner’s poem
‘The Tourist Looks at Spain’, first published in the Spain-dominated fourth issue
of John Lehmann’s journalNew Writing, in Autumn 1937, summed up the way in
which ‘Spain’ had galvanized British writers:
What we saw dead was all the time alive,
and what we see is living.
It is over our own eyes that the mist holds.
Say clearly: Spain has torn the veil of Europe.^2The Civil War here replaces the clich ́es of ‘what every tourist knows’ about Spain
with a new revelation. Just as Auden’s life force substitutes itself for the volunteers
whose choices it defines, so Warner’s poem enters a second and third remove of
address to invoke a collective commitment: ‘ ‘‘the same words spoken by many
different voices:|‘There is a world to win: we know the oppressors.’ ’’ ’ In the same
vein, Nancy Cunard’s 1937 poem ‘Yes, it is Spain’, derivative of Auden’s poem, asks
rhetorically, ‘What else could you do but go?’, making Spain the untranscendable
horizon of contemporary consciousness: ‘You think this is something new? No; this
too becomes Spain,|Allofit,allofit’sSpain.’^3 Like Auden and Warner, Cunard
feels compelled to externalize the rhetoric, attributing the poem’s final summons
to a historic tribunal composed of her favourite writers and painters from Dante
to Zola, who command, in concert: ‘ ‘‘Every man to his battle, child; this is yours,
understand it,|In that desert where blood replaces water—Yes, it is Spain.’’ ’ The
‘words from the Pacific Americas, words of Antillean temper,|Coming together,
comrades, words from Finland to Abyssinia’,^4 of her unpublished ‘Sequences from
a Long Epic on Spain’ claim a similar polyphonic authority, as does her 1937
collective manifesto,Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War.
The coming together of individual commitment and collective action lies at the
ideological core of Civil War poetry. ‘Our generation’, Stephen Spender recollected
found in Valentine Cunningham (ed.),The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse(Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1980), 97–100 and 461–2.
(^2) Rex Warner, ‘The Tourist Looks at Spain’, inNew Writing IV(Autumn 1937), ed. John Lehmann
(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1937), 229. The issue also included three poems by the recently dead
John Cornford, together with Margot Heinemann’s elegies, ‘A Madrid Diary’ by the German writer
Alfred Kantorowicz, a translation of a poem by Lorca (‘deliberately murdered by the fascists soon after
the outbreak of the Civil War’, the contributors’ notes report), and a short play by a young Spanish
writer, Rafael Dieste. It closed with Spender’s ‘Notes on the International Congress’ held in Valencia
in the summer of 1937, ‘Spain Invites the World’s Writers’. Among other writings of and about the
war, the journal regularly published translations of theballad ‘Romances’ which flourished in Spain
during this period.
(^3) Nancy Cunard, ‘Yes, it is Spain’, inPoems of Nancy Cunard from the Bodleian Library,ed.John
Lucas (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2005), 45–6.
(^4) Cunard, ‘Sequences from a Long Epic on Spain’, ibid. 53–9.