Anthology Focuses on American Poetry about the Spanish Civil War

Why have so many American writers remained obsessed with a war that ended 60 years ago? And why does their story suddenly seem so relevant today? A new anthology gathers this history together and provides the answers.

So says Cary Nelson, the editor of The Wound and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Spanish Civil War (University of Illinois Press; http://www.press.uillinois.edu). Nelson is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Over the past 15 years, he has led a one-man crusade to bring out the literature, including letters, posters and photography, of the war, which drew some 3,000 Americans and 40,000 others to Spain.

Nelson argues that although Americans are "fabled as isolationists," their poetry of the Spanish Civil War "shows a 60-year concern with world history. Many of our well-known poets not only wrote about the Spanish Civil War, but a number of them returned to the topic again and again.

"No one has ever before recognized that Americans have written more poems about this subject than any other nationality except Spaniards," Nelson said.

The anthology, which includes a long introduction, a glossary and a biographical section, allows one to see how 56 poets were "both inspired and haunted by this first antifascist cause of the 1930s," Nelson said. There were poets, including Muriel Rukeyser, Aaron Kramer and Norman Rosten, who wrote about the war in 1936 or 1937 and returned to the topic many times over the course of their lives, for nearly 40 years. Others, like National Book Award-winning poet Philip Levine, "have made the Spanish Civil War the center of their whole career in the second half of the century."

Nelson sees parallels between the war in Spain and more recent events in the United States.

"Spain was the first war that saw large-scale bombing of cities, so many of the early poems take up the horror of civilian vulnerability to what was experienced not as ordinary warfare but as terror. These poems thus almost feel like a responses to 9/11 half a century ago. Indeed, this effort to inhabit a violent tragedy has many points of connection with what Americans are living through now."

Nelson noted that Spanish Civil War posters even depicted airplanes "diving toward skyscrapers."

To Nelson and the poets, the connection between poetry and war is not ephemeral.

"The poems seem written not out of choice, but out of deep need," he said. The last stanza of Kramer's 1937 poem "Smiles and Blood" suggests the connection and the need: "Smile at me again, / And tell me how unpleasant is the bloody War in Spain. / Say that all is night, / And nothing there is worth the poem I will write. / Shudder in your plea, / And say how far from poetry the Civil War must be. / ------ I'll smile, too, as you rave, / And think how great the poem is: the spilt blood of the brave." About 100 American veterans of the Spanish Civil War are still alive, many of them active in chapters of Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.