Spain
(Pamphlet; 1937)
Yesterday all the past. The language of size
Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion
Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;
Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;
Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.
Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards,
The divination of water; yesterday the invention
Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of
Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of
Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.
Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants,
The fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,
The chapel built in the forest;
The chapel built in the forest;
Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles;
The trial of heretics among the columns of stone;
Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns
And the miraculous cure at the fountain;
And the miraculous cure at the fountain;
Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle.
Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines,
The construction of railways in the colonial desert;
Yesterday the classic lecture
Yesterday the classic lecture
On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle.
Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek,
The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;
Yesterday the prayer to the sunset
Yesterday the prayer to the sunset
And the adoration of madmen. But to-day the struggle.
As the poet whispers, startled among the pines,
Or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright
On the crag by the leaning tower:
On the crag by the leaning tower:
“O my vision. O send me the luck of the sailor.”
And the investigator peers through his instruments
At the inhuman provinces, the virile bacillus
Or enormous Jupiter finished:
Or enormous Jupiter finished:
“But the lives of my friends. I inquire. I inquire.”
And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper: “Our day is our loss, O show us
History the operator, the
History the operator, the
Organiser. Time the refreshing river.”
And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror:
The private nocturnal terror:
“Did you not found the city state of the sponge,
“Raise the vast military empires of the shark
And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?
Intervene. O descend as a dove or
Intervene. O descend as a dove or
A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend.”
And the life, if it answers at all, replies from the heart
And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city
“O no, I am not the mover;
“O no, I am not the mover;
Not to-day; not to you. To you, I’m the
“Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped;
I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be
Good, your humorous story.
Good, your humorous story.
I am your business voice. I am your marriage.
“What’s your proposal? To build the just city? I will.
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain.”
Many have heard it on remote peninsulas,
On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fishermen’s islands
Or the corrupt heart of the city,
Or the corrupt heart of the city,
Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.
They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch
Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;
They floated over the oceans;
They floated over the oceans;
They walked the passes. All presented their lives.
On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot
Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;
On that tableland scored by rivers,
On that tableland scored by rivers,
Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever
Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond
To the medicine ad, and the brochure of winter cruises
Have become invading battalions;
Have become invading battalions;
And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin
Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.
Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom
As the ambulance and the sandbag;
As the ambulance and the sandbag;
Our hours of friendship into a people's army.
To-morrow, perhaps the future. The research on fatigue
And the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the
Octaves of radiation;
Octaves of radiation;
To-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing.
To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love,
The photographing of ravens; all the fun under
Liberty's masterful shadow;
Liberty's masterful shadow;
To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician,
The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome;
To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers,
The eager election of chairmen
The eager election of chairmen
By the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle.
To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.
To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.
To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,
The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert,
The masculine jokes; to-day the
The masculine jokes; to-day the
Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.
The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.
“Spain 1937”
(Published in Another Time; 1940)
Yesterday all the past. The language of size
Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion
Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;
Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.
Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards,
The divination of water; yesterday the invention
Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of
Horses; yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.
Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants;
The fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,
The chapel built in the forest;
Yesterday the carving of angels and of frightening gargoyles.
The trial of heretics among the columns of stone;
Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns
And the miraculous cure at the fountain;
Yesterday the Sabbath of Witches. But to-day the struggle.
Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines;
The construction of railways in the colonial desert;
Yesterday the classic lecture
On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle.
Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek;
The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;
Yesterday the prayer to the sunset,
And the adoration of madmen. But to-day the struggle.
As the poet whispers, startled among the pines
Or, where the loose waterfall sings, compact, or upright
On the crag by the leaning tower:
“O my vision. O send me the luck of the sailor.”
And the investigator peers through his instruments
At the inhuman provinces, the virile bacillus
Or enormous Jupiter finished:
“But the lives of my friends. I inquire, I inquire.”
And the poor in their fireless lodgings dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper: “Our day is our loss. O show us
History the operator, the
Organiser. Time the refreshing river.”
And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror:
“Did you not found the city state of the sponge,
“Raise the vast military empires of the shark
And the tiger, establish the robin’s plucky canton?
Intervene. O descend as a dove or
A furious papa or a mild engineer: but descend.”
And the life, if it answers at all, replies from the heart
And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city:
“O no, I am not the Mover;
Not to-day; not to you. To you, I’m the
“Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped:
I am whatever you do; I am your vow to be
Good, your humorous story;
I am your business voice; I am your marriage.
“What’s your proposal? To build the Just City? I will.
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision: yes, I am Spain.”
Many have heard it on remote peninsulas,
On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fishermen’s islands,
In the corrupt heart of the city;
Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.
They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch
Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;
They floated over the oceans;
They walked the passes: they came to present their lives.
On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot
Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe,
On that tableland scored by rivers,
Our fever’s menacing shapes are precise and alive.
To-morrow, perhaps the future: the research on fatigue
And the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the
Octaves of radiation;
To-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing.
To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love;
The photographing of ravens; all the fun under
Liberty’s masterful shadow;
To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician.
To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings: but to-day the struggle.
To-day the inevitable increase in the chances of death;
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the fact of murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.
To-day the makeshift consolations; the shared cigarette;
The cards in the candlelit barn and the scraping concert,
The masculine jokes; to-day the
Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.
The stars are dead; the animals will not look:
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.
Auden's Spain was part of the general debate -- raised again recently -- over the West's moral responsibility and military role in countries suffering under a despot. His poem was clearly on the side of doing more than talk, a plea to his contemporaries that "Our moments of tenderness blossom / As the ambulance and the sandbag; / Our hours of friendship into a people's army":
"What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will.
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain."
As Auden saw it, there would be plenty of time for guilt and politics later, "But today the struggle":
Today the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.
To day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,
The cards in the candle-lit barn, and the scraping concert,
The masculine jokes; to-day the
Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.
The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say alas but cannot help or pardon.
Orwell praised Auden's Spain as "one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war," but he objected strongly to the idea that those who intervened on the Republican side should have any "guilt in the necessary murder," saying that the line could only have been written by someone "to whom murder was at most a word." He despaired over the collapse of the Republican cause from within and without -- Orwell had to flee Spain himself when he found himself caught in the crossfire of rival socialist factions -- but he wrote Homage to Catalonia and spent a lifetime speaking out for a better socialism, in whatever genre or forum he could command.
Auden had also promoted socialism, but he now went in other directions. He would eventually revise, renounce and try to suppress Spain, feeling that its (or perhaps any) politics were juvenile, its poetry as bad. When he left England for America at the beginning of WWII, many criticized him as a deserter; looking back from his new vantage point on the day Germany invaded Poland he responded with "September 1, 1939," one of his most famous poems:
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odor of death
Offends the September night....
Modern British Literary Traditions May 2011 Tania Flores
Every Poet Stands Alone:
The Displacement of the Body in W.H. Auden’s Spain/“Spain 1937”
In 1937, W.H. Auden published a poem about the Spanish Civil War in the form of the political pamphlet Spain. In 1940, he published “Spain 1937”, an altered version of the piece, in Another Time, a collection of his poetry. Spain (1937) and “Spain 1937” (1940) have alternately – and often simultaneously – occasioned the praise and contempt of literary critics for the last 70 years. As Sean C. Grass writes, these critics “still regard W.H. Auden’s ‘Spain 1937’ as the cornerstone of his political verse” (84). Controversial in large part for the disparities between the two versions of the poem, for Auden’s renunciation of the piece after its appearance in Another Time, and for the profound shift in Auden’s philosophy about poetry and politics that his revisions represent, Spain/“Spain 1937” continues to attract analysis and attention. In his 1940 essay “Inside the Whale”, George Orwell acknowledges parenthetically that “this poem is one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war”, but follows this judgment with a scathing critique of one specific verse in the poem, stating that it “could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word” (516). Orwell’s essay, and his evaluation of Auden as a prime example of the naïve, idealistic, English liberal who volunteered to participate in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republicans, continues to serve as a model for critiques of Spain/“Spain 1937”. Grass’s rhetoric, for example, embodies traces of Orwell’s opinion of Auden; he writes that Auden’s disappointed expectations of Marxism in Spain “had been so easy to cultivate in his comfortable nook in England” (90). Orwell’s essay also drew wrath, particularly from the left; in the anthology Out of Apathy, E.P. Thompson wrote an essay entitled “Outside the Whale” in which he labeled “Inside the Whale” an example of the “discrete ideology of intellectual alienation and of quietism, the apologia for apathy” (153). Most recently, John Farrell has argued that although Spain was a “brilliant accomplishment” (241), Auden was unable to realize the connection between the personal and the private spheres in non-psychological terms. Farrell, whose paper is premised on the idea that psychoanalysis served as a framework for the poem, attributes this failure to the limitations of psychoanalysis. In his view, because psychoanalysis reduces the political to the personal, Auden could not formulate a collective call-to-arms coherent with the poem’s tendency toward “undermining the moral basis for war itself” (240).
The analyses of both Grass and Farrell, however, are limited by their narrow scope – neither Grass nor Farrell endeavors a serious study of the revisions Auden made to Spain or of the differences between the two versions of the poem – as well as by their focus on the biographical details of Auden’s evolution before, during and after his time in Spain. While both scholars make noteworthy contributions to the literature on Spain/“Spain 1937”, neither scholar grounds his analysis in the text of the poem: Grass focuses on Auden’s disappointment with Oxford for instilling in him the Marxist ideology “that failed utterly and miserably” (90) to meet his expectations, while Farrell turns to well-rehearsed arguments against psychoanalysis for an explanation of the complexities of the poem.
Unfortunately, Farrell’s point of departure dictates the boundaries of his understanding of these complexities, and in his examination of the public and private dimensions of Auden’s politics, he neglects the spatial dimensions of the text itself. The spheres he identifies are not simply dimensions of the politics that motivated his work; these are spheres that can be found within the poem in the form of nature and industrialization. The poem suggests that the process of industrialization disrupted nature – and by extension, the symbiotic relationship between humans and nature – and eventually caused the displacement of the body into urbanity and industrialized structures. The original function of industry was that of the production of tools for use by the body, but technological progress caused the blurring of the distinguishing line between urbanity and the body, thus creating the terms under which the two entities could be conflated and catalyzing the assimilation of the body into urban space. Industrialization served a corruptive function by decomposing the human form, divorcing the mind and body, and thus rendering urban and natural spaces alike inhospitable and alienating. The premise of Auden’s poem, then, establishes a dichotomy of inhuman spaces; the only human spaces that appear in Spain are those assigned to ‘tomorrow’, the temporal period that follows “the struggle”. By Auden’s logic, achieving this re-humanization necessitates the reintegration of the mind and body, to which war is particularly given. Political strife and the whole human it requires serve as the means of reaching ‘tomorrow’.
In revising Spain, Auden chose to excise the verses that addressed the mind/body reintegration and the reclamation of the industrialized structure as a tool rather than a substitute for the body. In addition and perhaps most importantly, Auden chose to eliminate the word ‘body’ altogether, while simultaneously retaining the verses describing the displacement of the body into urbanity and the corruption of humans by industrialization. The result is a loss of agency that undermines the possibility of political strife, which cannot be carried out without an integrated, whole human to aspire to the vision of a re-humanized environment.
In addition, a close reading of the two poems reveals a second, little discussed tool used by Auden in his revisions. The incorporation of semicolons marks and characterizes the revised poem with respect to the original. The effect of semicolons – which replace many, if not most, of the periods, commas and colons of Spain – is a radical revision of the tone of the poem. In contrast to the urgency, definitiveness and passion of Spain, the tone of “Spain 1937” is hesitant, rambling, and lacking in will. By means of excision and the inversion of the meanings of the poem’s punctuation, Auden robs his poem of its potency and of its potential for framing the Spanish Civil War constructively.
The Discourse of Auden’s Decision to Participate in the Spanish Civil War.
Given its aforementioned place in the Auden canon as “the cornerstone of his political verse” (Grass 84), the repeated use of Spain/“Spain 1937” as evidence for Auden’s shift in thought about politics and poetry is not surprising. The scholars who have engaged in these often oversimplified and reductive analyses have neglected to note that, as Grass observes, Auden’s intentions in volunteering for the Republican cause in Spain were not purely politically motivated from the outset. In two letters to a friend dated early December 1936 and quoted in Humphrey Carpenter’s work W.H. Auden: A Biography, Auden articulates his reasoning for volunteering to assist Republican efforts in the Spanish Civil War. In the first of these letters, he writes, “I so dislike everyday political activities that I won’t do them, but here is something I can do as a citizen and now as a writer, and as I have no dependents, I feel I ought to go” (Carpenter 206). Although a sense of civic duty infuses this statement, Auden also notes his interest in participating in the war as a writer. Significantly, this reason persists and predominates in his subsequent written elaborations on his decision. In the second of these letters, he writes, “I am not one of those who believe that poetry need or even should be directly political, but in a critical period such as ours, I do believe that the poet must have direct knowledge of the major political events” (207). Auden, however, was not content with “academic knowledge” of these events; he realized that “what [the poet] can write about is what he has experienced in his own person” (207). Nor did Auden’s other comments about volunteering betray glorification of combat or naïveté about war, and his tone in these letters cannot be described as optimistic, hopeful, or enthused.
Regardless of whether Auden’s sense of civic duty or his aspirations to become a better poet played a greater role in his decision to serve in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell misjudged Auden in his labelling of the poet as “the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled” (516). Auden was not ignorant or flippant about the psychological challenges and ramifications of war. In the second letter, he admitted, “I shall probably be a bloody bad soldier but how can I speak to/for them without becoming one?” (207) Long before Orwell wrote and published “Inside the Whale”, Auden had been made well aware of the fact that he would be judged naïve if he chose to write about war without serving actively himself. These excerpts from Auden’s 1936 letters redirect the interpretation of his 1940 revisions; the breadth of Auden’s poetic terrain as well as his political ideology was at stake in his participation in the war.
The Industrialized/Natural Spaces and the Landscape of Tomorrow in Spain
The image of Spain that emerges from the 1937 version of Auden’s poem does not characterize the country in purely rural or urban terms, nor does it engage in an idealization of either the rural or urban spaces. The Spain of Auden’s pamphlet is a Spain described in terms of the conquest of nature by humans. The poem defines human evolution by technological progress, by “the diffusion/Of the counting-frame and the cromlech” (lines 2-3) and by “the invention/Of cartwheels and clocks” (lines 6-7). Human infrastructure dominates the landscape of the present; recounting the events of ‘yesterday’, the temporal period preceding the struggle, the speaker narrates, “Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants,/The fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,/The chapel built in the forest” (lines 9-11) and “Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines,/The construction of railways in the colonial desert” (lines 17-18). The reach of these mechanical manifestations of humanity extends even to the groupings of land masses: the speaker observes the way in which Spain is “soldered so crudely to inventive Europe” (line 66). The human accomplishments of the Spain of ‘yesterday’ produced a Spain made of steel and stone and rendered permanent by soldering. Humans did not realize these accomplishments, however, without damaging their relationship to nature. The artificiality of industrialization and the social, political and economic structures it engendered effectively Othered nature. As a result, the speaker characterizes the few unindustrialized locations that appear in the poem as cold and distant. In the eighth stanza, the speaker describes the scientist, who “peers through his instruments/At the inhuman provinces…” (lines 29-30). In context, the term ‘inhuman’ is a disparaging term; as it is obvious that the provinces are not human, the adjective takes on the meaning of “brutal, unfeeling, cruel” (“Inhuman”). Similarly, the speaker later references “the unjust lands” (line 62), furthering the theme of rural areas as incompatible with and antagonistic to the false needs humans have developed in the industrialized spaces. In perhaps the most dramatic instance of this characterization, the speaker begins the last stanza of the poem with the verse, “The stars are dead. The animals will not look” (line 101). In addressing this line, Farrell writes, “We are alone in a Nature that bears no relation to us” (241). Farrell gives voice to the concept communicated to the reader in this verse, the impression that nature manifests itself distantly, heartlessly, and that humans are exclusively responsible for “the struggle”.
Concurrent with and inseparable from the distancing and antagonizing of nature is the erosion of difference between humans and the urban, industrialized structures in which they situate themselves. The conflation of the body and urbanity is immediately visible in the stanza that begins with the verses, “And the life, if it answers at all, replies from the heart/And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city” (lines 45-46). These lines are initially notable for the corporality of the life-force the speaker is alluding to, but upon closer examination, their most significant feature becomes apparent: in these lines, the speaker draws a metaphorical link between urban, industrialized structures – “the shops and squares of the city” – and the human body’s organs – “heart”, “eyes”, and “lungs”. Because the speaker does not pass immediate judgment on this link, however, the reader is not given instructions on how to interpret the conflation of the body and urbanity until the speaker makes reference to “the corrupt heart of the city” three stanzas later (line 59). This verse implies a confluence of the tropes of urbanity, corporality, and corruption. The industrial and natural spaces alike are devoid of humanity; in the two stanzas consisting of lines 57-60 and 61-64, the speaker places “the corrupt heart of the city” on the same inhuman level as the “remote peninsulas” (line 57) and the “unjust lands” (62).
For ‘today’, for the duration of “the struggle”, the inhospitality of the industrialized space dovetails with the inhospitality of the natural space. The speaker goes on to suggest that urban and rural spaces can only be fused and re-humanized ‘tomorrow’. The speaker hints at the harmony of the future: “To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love,/The photographing of ravens…” (lines 81-82) and “To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,/The walks by the lake in perfect communion;/To-morrow the bicycle races/Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle” (lines 89-92). These are the only verses in which nature – which here manifests itself in the form of “ravens”, “walks by the lake”, and “summer evenings” – and humans interact symbiotically. In addition, instead of placing the humanized humans of ‘tomorrow’ in the city or the province, the speaker elects to place them in a hybrid environment, the “suburbs”. Auden’s emphasis on the temporal distinctions of the world he constructs in Spain communicate to the reader that this possibility of fusion and reconciliation is only possible after ‘today’.
Re-humanizing for ‘Tomorrow’: Reclaiming Corporality in War The verse “But to-day the struggle”, which ends five of the poem’s stanzas, places the reader firmly in the moment of the Spanish Civil War, not in the ‘yesterday’ of human cultural artifacts, not in the ‘tomorrow’ of harmonious nature and communities. During the temporal period of ‘today’, the individual, trapped in the spatial dichotomy of the inhospitality and inhumanity of corrupt urbanity and alien nature, attempts to repossess the body and reclaim it from urbanity. Paradoxically, it is during war that the individual has the opportunity to reintegrate him or herself and renew his or her humanity. Corporality emerges as a central element of the struggle; the speaker observes, “Our thoughts have bodies;/the menacing shapes of our fever/Are precise and alive” (68-69). These lines are arguably the ones that determine the poem and the ramifications of Auden’s revisions in 1940. The first verse, “Our thoughts have bodies”, explains the seamless relationship between mind and body that emerges from the awakening provoked by war; the verses “the menacing shapes of our fever/Are precise and alive” fulfill a similar purpose, merging the psychological “menacing shapes” and the palpably physiological “fever” and “alive”.
That Auden saw this opportunity for renewal and the reclaiming of corporality as a property of war is confirmed by the remaining verses of the stanza that begins “Are precise and alive” as well as the stanza that follows. The complete stanzas read as follows:
Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond
To the medicine ad, and the brochure of winter cruises
Have become invading battalions;
And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin
Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.
Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom
As the ambulance and the sandbag;
Our hours of friendship into a people's army.
In this section of the poem, the speaker constructs a causal relationship between the reintegration of the mind and body and the transformation of both psychological and physical evidence of the corruption of humans during war; the speaker suggests that people’s responses to false needs – “the fears which made us respond/To the medicine ad, and the brochure of winter cruises” – can be redirected constructively in war and can become “invading battalions”. The speaker reiterates the corruption of human corporality in lines 72-73, asserting, “And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin/Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb”. Again, in these lines the speaker emphasizes the displacement of the body – in this case, the “face” – into industrialized structures. However, as was the case in the previous lines, war poses the possibility of a redemptive reclaiming of the body.
Expurgating Spain: Auden’s Revocation of the Possibility of Re-humanization
In 1940, the same year that George Orwell published “Inside the Whale”, the essay containing a relatively harsh critique of Spain, Auden published Another Time, a collection of the poetry he wrote in the late 1930s. Grass notes that Spain was not the only political poem that Auden revised during this period; “Oxford” was also revised “in order to remove its politically charged penultimate stanza” (Grass 92-93). Spain, which Auden had written in 1937, reappeared in Another Time as “Spain 1937”. The differences between Spain and “Spain 1937” are significant, both semantically and stylistically. Two of the three stanzas Auden cut from Spain for “Spain 1937” are the ones quoted above and constituted by lines 69-72 and 73-76. Auden preserved the phrase “menacing shapes of our fever/are precise and alive” in the form of “Our fever’s menacing shapes are precise and alive”, but he completely eliminated the phrase “our thoughts have bodies”. In circumventing the reintegration of the mind and body in war as well as the potential for the redemption of humanity in the transformation of greed and corruption, Auden imposed on his poem a loss of human agency. The stanzas articulating the problem of ‘today’ and the vision of ‘tomorrow’ remain in “Spain 1937”. The body continues to be displaced into urbanity and industrialized structures, and the industrialized structures continue to corrupt humanity in divorcing the body from the mind. The vision of a human, harmonious ‘tomorrow’ persists. But Auden’s refreshingly original and provocative proposition for the solution vanishes in his refusal to (re)affirm the body and human corporality.
Although the changes Auden made to the diction of the poem were minimal, he did revise the wording of the line Orwell had taken issue with in “Inside the Whale”. In 1937, the line in question read, “To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death” (line 94). Of this line, Orwell wrote the following:
But notice the phrase ‘necessary murder’. It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. It so happens that I have seen the bodies of numbers of murdered men – I don’t mean killed in battle, I mean murdered. Therefore I have some conception of what murder means – the terror, the hatred, the howling relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells. To me, murder is something to be avoided…Mr. Auden’s amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. (516)
As we have seen, Auden’s personal writings, and his letters in particular, strongly evidence the fact that Orwell greatly exaggerated the naïveté and idealism of Auden. But his spitefulness aside, Orwell raises a valid question: What did Auden mean by ‘necessary murder’? What are the ramifications of Auden’s choice to term killing in battle ‘murder’?
For the publication of “Spain 1937” in Another Time, Auden made changes to both the “necessary murder” line and the line that precedes it. The verses in Spain read, “To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,/The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder” (Spain, lines 93-94), while the verses in “Spain 1937” read, “To-day the inevitable increase in the chances of death;/The conscious acceptance of guilt in the fact of murder” (“Spain 1937”, lines 81-82). The changes in diction – “deliberate” to “inevitable” and “necessary murder” to “fact of murder” – exemplify the trend that persisted throughout the rest of Auden’s revisions to Spain: the attempt to remove agency, to shift the culpability and responsibility away from the actors in war and onto the nature of the war itself. Auden’s changes to these particular lines reduce the possibility that they might be construed as hawkish, but they also remove the subject, the actor, from the image of war. A “deliberate increase” is planned and thus requires a subject, while an “inevitable increase” could plausibly arise spontaneously out of the phenomenon of war. Similarly, a “necessary murder” requires action by a subject, while “the fact of murder” creates the illusion that killing is not an act carried out by an individual, but rather, that it’s simply an unfortunate event that sometimes occurs.
In his work The Poetry of W.H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island, Monroe K. Spears quotes from a letter written from Auden to Spears and dated May 11th, 1963, not only long after Orwell’s publication of “Inside the Whale” and his own publication of Another Time, but also after Auden had renounced the poem completely. Addressing Orwell’s critique of Spain, Auden said:
I was not excusing totalitarian crimes but only trying to say what, surely, every decent person thinks if he finds himself unable to adopt the absolute pacifist position. (1) To kill another human being is always murder and should never be called anything else. (2) In a war, the members of two rival groups try to murder their opponents. (3) If there is such a thing as a just war, then murder can be necessary for the sake of justice. (Spears 157) This excerpt demonstrates Auden’s unusually high degree of commitment to honesty about war; not only is his posture remarkably far from naïveté or idealism, but it is a stronger position than many of his critics were willing to argue for. After concluding that “a writer does well to keep out of politics,” Orwell stated, “Literature as we know it is an individual thing, demanding mental honesty and a minimum of censorship” (518). Orwell failed to see that the mental honesty evident in the letter from Auden quoted above pervades Spain. Meanwhile, the very syntax and diction of his statement equivocating, Farrell wrote, “But Orwell certainly has the better of the argument here, for it is hard to understand how something called ‘murder’ can ever be justified” (240). Of course, Farrell does not put forth any explanation of whether and to what extent the argument for the inherent injustice of ‘murder’ applies to war.
Within the schema I have suggested as an interpretation of Spain, the agency of “necessary” and “deliberate” are absolutely essential to the success of the attempt to escape the inhuman spaces of the industrialized and the natural. An extension of this particular interpretation would render embracing one’s corporality – and thus vulnerability and mortality – unreservedly and without inhibitions the only means of achieving re-humanization. Finitude defines the human body; witnessing, causing, and experiencing death are therefore crucial for the achievement of a balanced comprehension of death. Accordingly, in war, murder is necessary and an increase in the chances of death deliberate. The radicalism of Auden’s poem and its commitment to honesty, as evidenced by “necessary murder”, seems to have been lost on many of the piece’s critics.
The Abundant Semicolon in “Spain 1937”: Vacillation, Restraint and Lack of Agency
Although the differences in semantics between Spain and “Spain 1937” certainly take precedence over the minimal syntactical and stylistic changes, it is worth noting the most obvious syntactical and stylistic change to the piece: the replacement of a significant number of the periods, commas, and colons of Spain with semicolons in “Spain 1937”, compounded by multiple additions of commas and colons where there were none before.
The primary effect of the incorporation of the semicolon is that of reducing the effectiveness, momentum, definitiveness, passion, and manifesto-like quality of the poem. Vacillation characterises “Spain 1937”, the tone of which contrasts sharply with the self-assured quality of Spain. The semicolon lessens the effect of the anger and sense of urgency on the reader, in large part because the use of the semicolon mirrors the loss of agency found elsewhere in the transition between Spain and “Spain 1937”.
“Every poet stands alone”
In 1948, Auden published an essay on poetry in the collection Poets at Work titled “Squares and Oblongs”. In this essay, Auden writes, “Over too, the day of the salon and the café, the select group of enthusiastic rebels. No more movements. No more manifestoes. Every poet stands alone” (176). More than a decade after the publication of Spain, Auden had not only renounced both versions of the poem but also concluded that poets should disentangle themselves entirely from politics. Auden’s position on this question in “Squares and Oblongs” evinces a radical change in his line of thought, a startling willingness to relinquish the desire to have “direct knowledge of the major political events” and to “speak to/for” the soldiers.
As nearly every scholar who has critically examined Spain/“Spain 1937” has discovered, upon arriving in Spain, Auden learned that he would not be allowed to serve in the positions he considered useful both for the cause and for his own purposes. Grass writes that “the Republican bureaucracy quickly recognised that Auden’s greatest utility to the Left was as a propagandist rather than a soldier. Accordingly, they set him to writing and broadcasting, denying him the experience of driving an ambulance as he had planned” (90). In describing the circumstances that determined the publication of Spain in pamphlet form, Grass suggests that the poem was written for the purposes of propaganda, thereby exposing the complications that problematised the relationship between Auden and his piece, namely his failure to expand his poetic terrain and to re-appropriate his body by serving in war.
Spain emerges as the paradoxical result of this failure; the work is at once a call for the reintegration of mind and body in war and, as an entity in and of itself, an admission of Auden’s inability to execute this reintegration. Auden did not volunteer to participate in the Spanish Civil War to act as a public relations representative or to apply his writing skills to the production of propaganda; he traveled to Spain to become a soldier, to reclaim his body. Auden was constrained by the very problem he identified, and he was unable to experience a reality other than the one that existed in his mind, that of writing. The paradoxical nature of Spain created the conditions for the attempt at resolution that was “Spain 1937” and the renunciation that followed; Spain marked Auden’s limits as a writer, the boundary that he could not cross.
Works Cited
Auden, W.H. “Spain.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt and M.H. Abrams. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006. 2424-2427. Print.
---. “Spain 1937.” Another Time. New York: Random House, 1940. 89-92. Print.
---. “Squares and Oblongs.” Poets at Work. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1948. 163-181. Print.
Carpenter, Humphrey. W.H. Auden: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981. Print.
Farrell, John. “Auden's Call to Arms: ‘Spain’ and Psychoanalysis.” Cambridge Quarterly 38.3 (2009): 225-242. ProQuest. Web. 20 April 2011. <http://0-camqtly.oxfordjournals.org.oasys.lib.oxy.edu/content/38/3/225.full.pdf>.
Grass, Sean C. “W.H. Auden, from Spain to ‘Oxford.’” South Atlantic Review 66.1 (2001): 84-101. JSTOR. Web. 20 April 2011. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3202030>.
“Inhuman.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. 1 May 2011. <http://www.oed.com/>.
Orwell, George. “Inside the Whale.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968. 493-527. Print.
Spears, Monroe K. The Poetry of W.H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. Print.
Thompson, Edward Palmer. “Outside the Whale.” Out of Apathy. Ed. E.P. Thompson. London: Stevens & Sons Limited, 1960. 141-194. Print.
