Synopsis/Annotation: When the United States and other powers declined to help fight fascist power at the onset of the Spanish Civil War, forty thousand private citizens from fifty-two countries rallied to join the International Brigade's defense of the Spanish Republic. Born out of the struggle between fascism and democracy and considered the first battle of World War II, the Spanish Civil War holds tremendous ideological significance and has inspired a remarkable range of American poetry.The Wound and the Dream represents the sixty-year tradition of American poetic responses to the Spanish Civil War and provides an overview of progressive American poetry as a whole. Four of the featured poets -- Alvah Bessie, William Lindsay Gresham, James Neugass, and Edwin Rolfe -- were members of the International Brigade. Their poetry appears alongside lesser-known works by some of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, including Wallace Stevens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, and Philip Levine.Cary Nelson's introduction discusses the collective nature of the poems, puts them in their international context, and provides a sturdy frame-work for interpreting the Spanish Civil War as a historical conjecture that has dramatically altered the ways we read and write poetry. The book also includes a brief biography of each poet and a glossary of related terms.

Review Source: Choice


Review Date: February 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-252-02747-7
Nelson (Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) has produced a beautiful complement to Madrid, 1937: Letters of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the Spanish Civil War (1996), which he coedited with Jefferson Hendricks. As a selection of American poems about the Spanish Civil War, this book also complements The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, ed. by Valentine Cunningham (1980), which covers British poetry. Nelson includes an excellent introductory essay, which, in its focus on the "cultural work poems can do," offers a critical perspective strikingly different from the new critical approach one finds in such works as Marilyn Rosenthal's Poetry of the Spanish Civil War (CH, Jun'76). Nelson selects poems from veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, e.g., Alvah Bessie and Edwin Rolfe; from poets who were in Spain at or around the time of the war--Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser; and from contemporary poets who remain haunted by the war and what it signified, e.g., Carolyn Kizer, Ai, Philip Levine. These poems represent an important poetic tradition outside of canonical US modernism, a tradition of political engagement in which history is not merely background material or the stuff of imagery and metaphor. All collections. G. Grieve-Carlson Lebanon Valley College