The Wound and the Dream

Military Review, Nov-Dec, 2003 by Jeffrey C. Alfier, Cary Nelson

The fate the world has given me is to struggle to write powerfully enough to draw others into the horror--Bruce Weigl, The Circle of Hanh (Grove Press, New York, 2000).

With the publication of The Wound and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poetry about the Spanish Civil War (University of Illinois Press, Champaign, 2002), English professor and cultural historian Cary Nelson presents a meticulous, compelling anthology of poetry that underscores the fascination that the antifascist cause of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) has long held for American poets.

When the Spanish Civil War ended, two groups of poets returned to the undying theme of Spain-Spanish exiles and Americans. Throughout this anthology, Nelson gives readers a sense of "the collective and almost choral nature" of the war's poetry, as well as its "lyrical and rhetorical invention" that gives it its most moving and persuasive expression. Moreover, as he reminds us, the poetry of this war was read on the streets and in the trenches.

Like poems of any tragedy, the best are not the ones gloriously trumpeting broad causes or agendas, instead they are those that reveal poignant particulars of Individual lives. For example, in allusion to Clio--the first Muse--and the Inevitability of wartime death, James Rorty writes,

   Life takes its final meaning
   From chosen death; this stirrupcup
   History, the ancient, greedy
   bitch.

Describing the lives of children crippled by bombing from Franco's aircraft, Leslie Ullman speaks to the way--

   Someone dressed them
   in lace and gabardine, like
   the antique figures....
   Their deaths seemed to rise
   inside them
   like the sleep of the newly-born.

Yet, in many of the poems, polemic slogans interspersed In the lines disturb the continuity of the verse. Norman Rosten inserts:

MADRID! TOMB! FASCISM!

amid the lines of his poem, The March. However, the war's contemporaneous poets could not afford the literary luxury of distance from their subject; theirs was a moral urgency.

There is little to criticize in this enlightening book. Although one criticism might be that Nelson goes a bit far when he asserts that the United States willfully forgot the meaning of the Spanish Civil War. Another criticism is Nelson's lack of a more complete Index, and perhaps the dates when the poets wrote the poems should have been included with the poems themselves, not in the content pages.

These light criticisms aside, Nelson's anthology is a welcome addition to the growing body of poetry resurrected from under the avalanche of high modernism. The book is an excellent companion to earlier anthologies such as The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse by Valentine Cunningham (Penguin Books, New York, 1980), and Poetry of the Spanish Civil War by Marilyn Rosenthal (New York University, New York, 1975).

Although many question the motives of the Stalinists and the Iberian Left that composed so much of the antifascist forces, the poetry of the Spanish Civil War--as Nelson conclusively shows--"was one of the indisputable terms in which history burnt its name into the living flesh of its time." Nelson's collection of poems will certainly make historians and poets appreciative of this era.