The cartography of despair: Randall Swingler's The Map

Abstract

The poet, novelist, playwright, critic and editor Randall Swingler was the British Communist Party's best-known writer between the early 1930s and 1956. A founder editor of The New Reasoner , he was a crucial link between the Old Left and the first New Left. But in his last unpublished poetry he repudiated the utopianism of both the 1930s and the late 1950s. No other English poet wrote so powerfully about the intellectual and emotional crisis caused by the events of 1956 as Swingler did in his valetudinarian epic, The Map (1967), published here for the first time.