Abstract
John Cornford, who died on the Cordoba front in December 1936, is most frequently seen, by both enthusiasts and detractors, as a loyal Communist cadre, subscribing unequivocally to the Party line on the situation in Spain. Yet in his most powerful poem, “Full Moon at Tierz: Before the Storming of Huesca”, there is a significant hesitation, focused by a reference to the Seventh Congress of the Comintern. A close scrutiny of this poem, of letters and a “Political Report” he wrote from Spain, and an examination of some of his pre-Spain political writings, indicate a more complex picture, and suggest that he had considerable reservations about Party policy, particularly in relation to the “Popular Front” strategy, and to Communist dealings with other movements in the Republican camp.
Highlights
Auden (1937: 10) wrote of the young men who flocked to Spain to serve the cause of anti-fascism, in the wake of the Francoist rebellion against the Republic on July 17, 1936
John Lehmann (1955: 273), co-editor with Stephen Spender of the influential anthology Poems for Spain, recalled in his autobiography that in Spain “everything, all our fears, our confused hopes and beliefs, our half-formulated theories and imaginings, veered and converged towards its testing and its opportunity, like steel filings that slide towards a magnet suddenly put near them”
This article extends and in places reprises an argument first developed in my article “From
Summary
One of the writers the TLS reviewer singled out from Poems for Spain was John Cornford, whose poetry, he observed, was “written by the will rather than from the sensibility... the calculated acts of a fighter determined in vindicating his creed to be ‘invincible as the strong sun, / Hard as the metal of my gun’” The implicit struggle with the nerves involves disciplining the self into the iron resolve of the unquestioning cadre, even if there is “no rational argument”, and these paragraphs almost seem like an appeal to his hardline lover for ratification in one direction or another The strain of such an inner conflict is apparent in the paradoxical fusion of solidarity and solitude in a single line at the heart of “Full Moon at Tierz”: “ with my Party, I stand quite alone” (39). The poem’s harrowingly dramatic power derives from the way it enacts the very processes by which the isolated individual steels himself rhetorically to sink his ego in a “welded front” (39)
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