SpainRamkrishna Bhattacharya

The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) was on and Spain became an

international battleground for fascists and socialists from

nearly all parts of the world. Opponents of fascism, poets,

artists, critics, workers, etc., formed an International Brigade

to fight in defence of the duly elected Popular Front Republican

Government against a reactionary combination of insurgent army

leaders, clerics, and big landlords openly aided by Nazi Germany.

Young volunteers came from the USA too. Such an exhibition of

international solidarity in action was unprecedented. It has not

been repeated to date.

W. H. Auden (1907-1973), a young English poet, set out for

Barcelona in January 1937. He was to serve as an ambulance

driver for the International Brigade. He visited Valencia and

then went to the Front. On 4 March 1937, he came back home and

soon wrote a longish poem called “Spain”. Faber and Faber

printed it in the form of a pamphlet. The royalties were to go

for Medical Aid in Spain. Type-setting began on 1 April and the

pamphlet appeared on 20 May. The first print-order was for three

thousand copies: two thousand more had to be reprinted in July.

1

The poem evoked immediate response. Geoffrey Grigson in

New Verse, May 1937 acclaimed it as “an organic, grave, sensible

and moving statement, more reasonable and more free of bigotry

than any other political poem.” 2 Maynard Keynes in the New

Statesman called the poem “fit to stand beside great predecessors

in its moving, yet serene expression of contemporary feeling

towards the heart-rending events of the political world.” 3

Spain was reprinted for the second time during the

spring of 1937. Nancy Cunard, grand-daughter of a shipping

magnate, was the publisher. Ultimately, the poem, renamed “Spain

1937”, found a place in Auden’s next collection, Another Time

(1940). But it was not a verbatim reprint. Auden had revised

the poem thoroughly. He had omitted some passages. One that

referred to the “people’s army” had been dropped. The purpose

apparently was to reduce the degree to which the poem could be

identified with the Republican cause. This was the beginning of

what ultimately led to the withdrawal of the whole poem from

Auden’s Collected Shorter Poems 1937-1957, published in 1966.

Before going into the history of revisions and the final

exclusion of “Spain” from Auden’s approved poetical corpus, I may

be allowed to cite an instance of how effective the poem was in

the 1930s. “I remember,” writes Arnold Kettle, “the first time I

2

heard the poem read aloud (by Ian Watt) at a lunch-time meeting

in Cambridge which ended with a collection for Spanish medical

relief. It was certainly an example of poetry helping to make

something happen: but I don’t think any of us in the audience

thought we were being hectored or got at.” 4

Not everyone, however, liked Spain. Referring to the phrase

that occurs as a refrain, “To-day the struggle”, Edgell Rickword

in New Verse, November 1937, flatly declared: ‘ “To-day the

struggle, to-morrow the poetry and the fun”, that attitude of

Auden’s would be completely incomprehensible to the Spanish

intellectuals to-day.’ 5

Rickword shrewdly observed:

The setting-up of a pamphlet-poem antagonism, i.e. social

struggle versus inner struggle, is a reflection of the poet’s

continuing isolation, falsifying the perspective of social

development and delaying the reintegration of the poet into

the body of society. It is that need of re-integration, I

feel, which underlies the neurotic character of the dramas

Auden and Isherwood write, and they are really evading the

issue by tackling the problem in psychological terms.

George Orwell considered “Spain” “one of the few decent

things that have been written about the Spainsh war.” But then

3

he pounced upon the phrase “necessary murder” (line 94) and

commented wryly: “It could only be written by a person to whom

murder is at most a word”. 6 The remark points by implication to

the author’s political naivety.

Auden defended himself: “If there is such a thing as a just

war, then murder can be necessary for the sake of justice.” 7 H.

Carpenter, biographer of Auden, comments: ‘However, possibly as a

result of Orwell’s criticism, he (sc. Auden) changed the line to

“The conscious acceptance of guilt in the fact of murder”.’ 8

Edward Mendelson, on the other hand, asserts that there is no

basis for such a conjecture: “… Auden first published his

revision a month before Orwell published his objection”. 9

Mendelson’s view is more acceptable than Carpenter’s.

The revised text of “Spain” in Another Time (1940) omitted

three stanzas (stanzas 18, 19, and 22) of the first version and

some verbal changes also were made. 10

1937 version 1940 version

4

a) Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes Our

fever’s menacing shapes are precise

of our fever

and alive.

Are precise and alive.

(line 68)

(lines 68-69)

b) To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of To-day

the inevitable increase in the

death,

chances of death,

(line 93)

(line 81)

c) The conscious acceptance of guilt in the

The conscious acceptance of guilt in the

necessary murder;

fact of murder;

(line 94)

(line 82)

William Empson was sorry to see such omissions. He wrote in

the United Review, 1 August 1940:

5

He (sc. Auden) has also, very oddly, cut out the best and

most characteristic verses, the comparisons of aspects of

suburban fretfulness with the machine of war which they are

supposed to have engendered. And ‘the conscious acceptance

of guilt in the necessary murder’. 11

John Lehmann more acutely observed:

Apart from Spain (which is included [in Another Time]), the

serious poems as a whole and particularly the later ones,

show an increasing remoteness from the immediate conflicts

of the world, and more than one hint of a new semi-religious

mystique. The trajectory which had risen from Poems 1930 and

brought Auden so close to the Socialist movement, seems here

to be on its downward curve. He can still write extremely

moving lyrics on topical themes, such as Refugee Blues and In

Memoriam Ernst Toller; sometimes he speaks in a way that strikes

home as the close of Spain did, [quotes the poem, “For us,

like any other fugitive,”]. But even in such lines he seems

enveloped in a haze of distance and regret, very different

from the mood that was uppermost in an earlier phase ….

There is also a tendency, which may well be closely

connected with this, to lose the compactness and the vivid

6

seeing which were characteristic of the best of his previous

poetry; 12

Auden always defended revisions on the ground that “A poem

is never finished. It is only abandoned”, an aphorism borrowed

from Paul Valery. Yet Auden vigorously denied that his revisions

were “ideologically significant”:

I can only say that I have never, consciously at any rate,

attempted to revise my former thoughts or feelings, only the

language in which they were first expressed when, on furthur

consideration, it seemed to me inaccurate, lifeless,

prolix or painful to the ear ….13

“Spain 1937” continued to be printed in its revised form.

It was included in The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (Random House,

1945) and Collected Shorter Poems 1930-1944 (Faber and Faber, 1950).

The poem, however, was not included in Auden: A Selection by the Author

(Penguin Books, 1958). The axe finally fell in 1966 when “Spain

1937”, along with six more poems, was excluded from Auden’s

Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (Faber and Faber, 1966). In a note

Auden said: “Some poems which I wrote and, unfortunately,

published, I have thrown out because they were dishonest or bad-

mannered, or boring.” 14

7

He then went on to describe what he meant by a dishonest

poem:

A dishonest poem is one which expresses, no matter how well,

feelings or beliefs which its author never felt or

entertained. For example, I once expressed a desire for

‘New styles of architecture’; but I have never liked modern

architecture. I prefer old styles, and one must be honest

even about one’s prejudices.

The last two lines of “Spain” and “Spain 1937” come as a case in

point:

Again, and much more shamefully, I once wrote:

History to the defeated

May say alas but cannot help or pardon.

To say this is to equate goodness with success. It would

have been bad enough if I had ever held this wicked

doctrine, but that I should have stated it simply because it

sounded to me rhetorically effective is quite inexcusable.

Auden stuck to this view of “Spain 1937” in his later years.

When Alan Bold sought permission from him to include the poem in

the Penguin Book of Socialist Verse (1970), Auden wrote back: “As you

know, I disapprove of my poem “Spain”, in particular of the last

two lines which assert that immoral doctrine (it may be marxist,

8

but it certainly isn’t socialist) that whoever succeeds

historically is just.” 15

However, a few years earlier (1964) Robin Skelton’s appeal

to print the original version of “Spain” (along with four other

poems by Auden) in Poetry of the Thirties was graciously acceded to

with the following proviso: the editor must declare that “Mr. W.

H. Auden considers these five poems to be trash which he is

ashamed to have written.” 16

Auden disapproved of the last two lines of “Spain”, because,

in his view, they expounded a “wicked doctrine”. And it is due

to this that he considered the whole poem to be immoral. The

well-arranged pattern – not spontaneous but artfully contrived –

representing “History with a big H”, 17 total identification

(“I am Spain”), the to-and-fro movement from yesterday to today,

then to tomorrow and back to today, and finally the scenario of

war and camaraderie are all rejected just because of the alleged

“wickedness”.

Not all readers agree with Auden’s view. Samuel Hynes, an

admirer of Auden, differed from such a judgement. The last

stanza of Spain, he thinks, simply says that, “History is

Necessity, and that it is made by men’s choices. Once it is

made, help and pardon are irrelevant. It is a harsh morality,

9

for a harsh time, but it is nevertheless a morality and not a

wicked one.” 18

Adapting Wilfred Owen’s famous sentence ‘The Poetry is in

the pity’ about his war poems, Hynes solemnly declares “[“Spain”]

is a pitiless poem; the poetry is in the pitilessness.”19

A. L. Rowse’s comments are even more matter-of-fact:

[Auden] came to disagree so violently with that conclusion

that he scored it out in all the copies he came across and

wrote ‘This is a lie’, and eventually deleted the whole poem

from his Works.

I do not know what is wrong with the statement …. In

fact history does not pardon the defeated; neither do I. 20

Rowse did not think highly of the poem. In fact he disliked

it for

It exemplifies his [sc. Auden’s] besetting sins of

indirection, allusiveness, obscurity merging into

meaninglessness. His biographer tells us that “Meaning was

never Auden’s greatest interest”. I call that his greatest

defect, for what is writing for but to express and

communicate?

Yet to contemporary readers, who sympathized with the

Republican government of Spain in 1937, the poem did have a

10

direct appeal. I have already mentioned how the poem was

received at a lunch-time meeting in Cambridge. Arnold Kettle

could never forget the last two lines. They came back to him

with a jolt in the 1970s when he visited Spain. He has left a

grim account:

And I remember, nearly forty years later, while Franco was

still there, being taken by a young Spanish colleague who

could not remember the war, to see the vast appalling

monument of victory which the Nationalists had built in the

hills outside Madrid, near the Escorial. After we had

walked round in silence I said to my Spanish friend: ‘What

were you thinking about?’ ‘About the Republican prisoners

who had to build the thing,’ he said. ‘What were you

thinking about?’ ‘About my friends,’ I said, and there was a

line of poetry I couldn’t get out of my head:

History to the defeated

May say alas but cannot help or pardon. 21

Response to poetry is almost certain to be subjective. It

depends all on the readers’ personal likes and dislikes, their

attitudes to life and views of the world around. All these are

conditioned by the time and space in which they grow up and the

11

situation they confront. As the proverb goes, “One man’s meat is

another man’s poison”. What one reader likes most is reviled by

another. Unanimity in appreciation and judgement is not always

to be expected.

It is all the more true in the case of political poetry,

specially those poems which are related to, or were inspired by,

contemporary events. The political outlook of the reader cannot

but colour his impression. Similarly, a reader’s philosophy of

life inclines him to choose or reject the message conveyed by a

political poem. “Spain”/ “Spain 1937” ended with a couplet which

confirmed some reader’s view (for example, Kettle’s) of its

relevance and was challenged by others (for example, Rowse).

John Lehmann praised the poem on a different ground: ‘He [sc.

Auden] is indeed more conscious of the force of history than any

modern poet, young or old, and this sense develops until it

reaches its fullest impression in his long ode on “Spain”.’ 22

It is no use quarrelling either with Kettle or with Rowse in

this matter. What I would like to point out is that, in spite of

all its technical brilliance and verbal felicity, “Spain”/ “Spain

1937” is indeed a “dishonest” poem as Auden himself later

admitted. The emotion that appears to lie behind the poem is not

12

at all genuine but simulated. There is enough external evidence

to prove it.

Let us take them up, one by one.

When Auden came back from Spain, he kept absolutely mum

about his experience. “He returned home after a very short visit

of which he never spoke”, 23 says Stephen Spender, a close

friend of Auden and a fellow-poet, who also ‘wrote many poems

about the Spanish War, over several years; Auden wrote only one

“Spain”.’ 24 When Auden decided to join the International Brigade

he wrote to E. R. Dodds: “I shall probably be a bloody bad

soldier but how can I speak to/for them without becoming one?” 25

Ultimately he changed his mind and intended to drive an ambulance

instead. 26

The silence that Auden observed regarding his experience in

Spain is significant. Many years later he admitted: “… I was

upset by many things I saw or heard about. Some of them were

described better than I could ever have done by George Orwell, in

Homage to Catalonia. Others were what I learned about the treatment

of priests.” 27

Auden was “profoundly shocked and distressed” to find all

the churches closed. All this was said nearly twenty years after

and, as Hynes suggests, “perhaps it is coloured by Auden’s

13

subsequent return to religion”. 28 But his silence in 1937 is

still significant. It is quite possible that “something

certainly happened in Spain that diminished his [sc. Auden’s]

commitment to the left line (which had never been very strong).”

It is not known whether “Spain” was a commissioned poem.

There is, however, a specific incident to remember: Auden, to the

great consternation of his admirers accepted the King’s Gold

Medal for Poetry in 1937, the very year “Spain” was written. 29

With the advantage of hindsight, Mendelsen has rightly noted that

“Spain” was “less committed than its first readers may have

imagined.” 30 Auden was already on his way to withdrawing into

the would of his eclectic values. The attempt he had made to get

out of his cocoon and ally himself with the masses did not really

work out well. He was basically apolitical. It was the

direction in which the political wind was blowing in the 1930s

all over Europe that made him embrace tentatively, and may be

experimentally, the cause of the left. Christopher Caudwell

noticed this in 1937 not only with regard to Auden but to his

fellow poets, Lewis, Spender and Lehmann as well: “How far this

is genuinely communicated and what level of art it represents, is

a consideration which will be deferred to our final chapter …”.

31 Hugh MacDiarmid, the Scottish Communist poet, was to express

14

his distaste about the Auden generation many years later in

stronger terms:

Michael Roberts and All Angels: Auden, Spender, those

bhoyos,

All yellow twicers: not one of them

With a tithe of Carlile’s courage and integrity.

Unlike these pseudos I am of – not for – the working class

And like Carlile know nothing of the so-called higher

classes

Save only that they are cheats and murderers,

Battening like vampires on the masses. 32

Even earlier, A. L. Morton, a Marxist critic, wrote in Daily

Worker (3 July 1935):

… Auden as in ‘The Orators’ and elsewhere, concentrates his

fire upon the secondary characteristics of the enemy. He

hates the bourgeoisie not because they are the bourgeoisie,

but because they have the qualities which as members of the

class to which they belong they must necessarily have.

The result is individual criticism and satire trying to

become social. 33

All this points to the fact that “Spain” was not the product

of a poet who felt sincerely and truly, for the cause of Spain.

15

As Auden later admitted, he “simply wrote such lines because they

sounded to [him] rhetorically effective”. This is the very mark

of simulated emotion.

In this connection we may recall Dr Johnson’s wry comments

on Milton’s “Lycidas”. The elegy, he thought, is “not to be

considered as the effusion of real passion; for passion runs not

after remote allusion and obscure opinions …. Where there is

leisure for fiction there is little grief.” 34

Not everybody has agreed with Dr Johnson’s adverse view of

“Lycidas”. 35 Whether or not applicable to “Lycidas”, Dr

Johnson’s comment view on simulated “passion” may very well be

applied to many commissioned poems or such poems that are

prompted by a sense of duty (political or otherwise) with little

or no genuine emotion on the poet’s part to support them.

After “Spain” Auden drifted from the Left and in course of

time became not only religious but a also a rabid anti-communist.

36 He emigrated to the USA in 1939 and was eagerly and fondly

adopted by the Establishment in both Europe and America.

I do not wish to suggest that such a drift began from

“Spain” nor cite these incidents of his life as evidence to prove

that Auden had already taken a right-ward turn when he wrote

“Spain”. But the revisions he made, culminating in the ultimate

16

withdrawal of the poem, were indeed prompted by political, not

aesthetic, considerations, notwithstanding his strong disavowal

of such a charge. It is somewhat strange that Auden’s own

apologia for revisions have been accepted without protest as if a

poet has every right to change his mind and his poem at the same

time. In 1973 Clive James noted in connection with “September 1,

1939”, a poem that Auden had decided to omit (along with “Spain

1937”) from his corpus:

Glumly reconciling themselves to the loss of ‘September 1,

1939’ in its entirety and favourite fragments from other

poems engraved in the consciousness of a generation, critics

respectfully conceded Auden’s right to take back what he had

so freely given. It was interesting, though, that no strong

movement arose to challenge Auden’s assumption that these

youthful poetic crimes were committed by the same self being

dishonest, rather than a different self being honest. Auden

was denying the pluralism of his own personality. It was

his privilege to do so if he wanted to, but it was

remarkable how tamely this crankily simplistic

reinterpretation of his own creative selfhood was

accepted.37

17

The only reason that Auden decided to withdraw this poem and

a few others is that, he came to admit, at least to himself, that

all these poems were based on simulated emotions and therefore

unworthy to remain in the corpus of his works. Simulated or not,

Auden’s “Spain” still retains validity as a poem which presents

powerfully the necessity of choice as a factor in determining the

course of history in certain critical situations. The refrain,

‘To-day is the struggle’, still rings through the corridors of

time whatever might have been the motive of Auden, who discarded

the poem as an unwanted child.

Notes and References

1. The basic information regarding the poem is taken from

Carpenter, pp.211-19.

2. Quoted in ibid.

3. Quoted in Davenport-Hines, p.166.

4. Kettle, p.112. The phrase, “poetry helping to make something

happen” alludes to a line in Auden’s “In Memory of W. B.

Yeats”: ‘For poetry makes nothing happen’.

5. Rickword, p.105.

6. Orwell (1957), p.36. Italics in the original. The book was

first published on 11 March 1940. Incidentally Orwell

18

misquoted the line from Auden in Adelphi, December 1938:

instead of “in the necessary murder” he wrote “for” (see

Davenport-Hines, pp.166-67.) Orwell attacked Auden again in

1940 in his “Mr Auden’s Brand” for allegedly abetting

totalitarian cruelty. It is reported that Auden held no

grudge against Orwell and even wrote generously of him in 1971

(Davenport-Hines, p.167).

7. Cited in Carpenter, p.219.

8. Ibid.

9. Mendelson (ed.), p.425. Orwell is known to have started

writing the essays for Inside the Whale on 24 May 1939 and

finished it by mid-December. Some of Orwell’s essays written

in 1939 have also found place in other publications.

10. See Mendelson (ed.), pp.210-13 and 424-25.

11. Empson in Haffenden (ed.), p.307.

12. Lehmann, pp.145-46.

13. Auden (1976), p.16. The extract that follows is from the

same source.

14. Auden (1966), reprinted in Auden (1976), p.16. The Foreword

is dated 1965.

15. Bold, p.60.

19

16. Skelton, p.41. Skelton, in his turn, was “most grateful to

Mr. Auden for putting the needs of this anthology before his

own personal wishes in this manner.” Auden, he says, “has

been monumentally generous in allowing me to use early texts

of five poems of which he now disapproves.”

17. For this expression I am indebted to Carr, p.65.

18. Hynes (1979), p.254.

19. Ibid. Owen, p.31.

20. Rowse, p.52.

21. Kettle, p.112.

22. Lehmann, p.30.

23. Cited in Carpenter, p.215.

24. Hynes (1979), p.251.

25. Quoted in Mendelson, p.xviii.

26. The government in Valencia is said to have refused Auden

permission to drive an ambulance which, according to his

friend Michael Yates, was “a mercy for the wounded” for Auden

was an erratic driver. Carpenter, p.211.

27. Cited in Carpenter, p.215.

28. Hynes (1979), p.252. The extract that follows is from the

same page.

29. Mendelson, p.xix.

20

30. Mendelson, p.xviii.

31. Caudwell (1977), p.132. See also, ibid. p.312. Auden

considered Caudwell’s Illusion and Reality to be “the most important

book on poetry since the books of Dr. I. A. Richards” (New

Verse, 25, (May 1937), p.22, quoted by Hynes in “Introduction”

to Caudwell (1970), p.20). Auden’s review of Caudwell

appeared in the same month as “Spain” was published (see

O’Neill and Reeves, p.215).

32. “Third Hymn to Lenin” in Bold (ed.), p.110. Italics in the

original.

33. Morton in Daily Worker, 3 July 1935, p.4 in Haffenden (ed.),

p.171. Auden, however, remained a blue-eyed boy of the

Communist Party of Great Britain till at least 1937. His

departure to Spain was announced in the Daily Worker (12 January

1937) as follows:

W. H. Auden, the most famous of the younger English poets,

co-author of ‘The Dog Beneath the Skin’, recently produced

in London, and a leading figure in the anti-Fascist movement

in literature, has left for Spain.

Cited in Hynes (1979), p.251. Claude Cockburn, a more

active communist, does not seem to

have taken Auden seriously. See Carpenter, pp.211-12.

21

34. Dr. Johnson, p.32.

35. For example, K. Deighton sets out to refute Johnson’s views

quite elaborately (pp.xi-xix), Kenneth Muir too counters Dr.

Johnson’s objections (p.10). See also David Daiches, pp.242-

43.

36. Auden participated in “one of Sidney Hook’s Anti-Communist

Liberal Congresses”, held in India in March 1951. He also

attended a meeting in Paris “organized by the recently found

Congress for Cultural Freedom (clandestinely funded by the

CIA)”. Davenport-Hines, p.280.

37. Jones in Haffenden (ed.), p.475.

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22

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23

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