The Word and the War: ‘Soft Power’ and ‘Hard Power’ in Three Republican Poems of the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

In this article three poems, by Miguel Hernández, Manuel Altolaguirre and Antonio Machado written in support of the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War, are discussed and compared in light of Nye’s thesis on ‘soft power’ and ‘hard power’. Whiston shows that the exuberant imagery through which their message of mainly ‘soft power’, with some ‘hard power’ thrown in, is communicated, has enabled these political poems to transcend the anecdotal circumstances—an accident with dynamite, a man’s death in action, a colonel’s letter from the battle-front—which had inspired their composition.