A Poets' War: British Poets and the Spanish Civil War
By Hugh D. Ford
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965.
Hardcover in dust jacket, 327 pages. First edition.

Dust jacket text:

The Spanish Civil War was the intellectual and emotional climax of the 1930's. The clash between the Spanish Republicans and the Insurgent forces seemed to crystallize the disparate ideologies of the decade, and more than any other event of the period it brought to the surface the inchoate political and social theories and humanitarian hopes of a generation of British poets.

The poems produced during the Spanish war by such men as Auden, Spender, and Day Lewis, to name but a few, mark the culmination as well as the end of a development in British poetry, a development which, beginning in the 1920's with the rejection of pessimism, became identified in the 1930's with ideological orthodoxy, economic and social ills, and the ideals of a socially just world, all of which the Spanish struggle came to embody. At no time during the decade were so many poets drawn to a social event. Behind their commitment was the wish to take sides and to be useful in a struggle they knew would have important consequences.

Such involvement was certain to influence the lives as well as the art of these men, and Dr. Ford explores in detail the impact of a complicated ideological war upon the beliefs and the work of the poets of the 1930's. The young poets who died fighting in Spain tried unsuccessfully to reconcile brute force and politics. Among those who remained in England, some subordinated artistic ideals to the heavy demands of politics, others eschewed political demands altogether and recorded a humanistic response to events in Spain, and a few found significant personal meanings in the struggle. For all of them, however, the Spanish war acted as a crucible in which were severely tested their social, political, and artistic beliefs.

Hugh D. Ford is presently professor of English at Trenton State College. He was born in 1925 in Washington, New Jersey. He received his B.A. degree from Dickinson College in 1950, his M.A. degree from Stanford University in 1952, and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1961. He has taught at the College of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio, and at the University of Pennsylvania. He has contributed reviews to periodicals devoted to Spanish affairs and is presently completing a study on the operation and publications of the Hours Press.

Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Mood of Protest and Spain
1. Background and War
2. England and the Spanish Civil War
3. Politics and Literature
4. Poet-volunteers
5. Civil War Poets in England
6. Anarchism and Humanism
7. Roy Campbell: The Voice of the Insurgents
8. The Oxford Poets and the Spanish War
Conclusions
Notes
A Selected Bibliography
Index