“Death to the Intelligentsia” was a favorite wartime slogan of the Right.
Lorca’s fate moved the poets to become active participants in the war, not just observers. Pablo Neruda had become a different poet; now he became a different man. There were no more surrealistic dead doves or pumpkins listening. There was the blood of children. There was Lorca’s blood, and much more to follow.
Two months into the war, Spain was an open wound, bleeding. Franco and his fellow generals took over large swaths of the country as they prepared for further attacks. At the beginning of October, German Junker and Italian Caproni planes started bombing supply points and airports on the road to Madrid. European governments were aware of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s blatant defiance of the nonintervention agreement, yet to confront them would risk increasing tensions in a region that was already a powder keg; Spain wasn’t important enough to risk causing an incendiary spark. The Soviet Union felt differently. Three months after Franco started the war, the Soviet Union began to supply military equipment to the Republicans (although sometimes at very high prices).
The Nationalist army’s plan to storm the capital was based on the belief that resistance would be minimal. Yet not only were workers in Madrid being trained feverishly under the dozens of army officers who had remained loyal to the Republic, but the vast majority of the city also remained loyal, and citizens prepared “to defend every one of Madrid’s cobblestones to the death,” as one mantra went. Refugees fleeing the small towns that the Nationalists had seized told of the relentless brutality the rebel army inflicted as it advanced toward the capital. The stories swept through the city as it braced for the assault, but a large majority of the population believed in the essential need to defend the Republic from its enemies. The residents were ready to resist street by street and house by house.
When Neruda was asked when he would write something for Mono azul, he had replied vaguely. Yet suddenly one day that September, Neruda came to the Mono azul offices and handed Luis Enrique Délano a new poem, typewritten with some corrections in ink:
They have not died! They are there
in the gunpowder,
standing, like burning fuses.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Mothers! They are standing in the wheat,
tall as the depth of midday
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Sisters like the fallen
dust, hearts
shattered,
have faith in your dead!
Not only are they roots
beneath the bloodstained stones,
not only do their poor battered bones
forever work the soil,
but their mouths still bite the dry gunpowder
and attack like oceans of iron, and still
their raised fists defy death.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Cast aside
your mourning cloaks, join together all
your tears until they become steel . . .
It was written in Neruda’s new style. It was to be understood immediately, clearly, by a wide audience. Bold, repeated words and vivid images were what mattered now to serve his purpose: to send a message through verse. “Song for the Mothers of Dead Militiamen” was Neruda’s first published Spanish Civil War poem, appearing in the September 24, 1936, issue of Mono azul. It was published unsigned, as Neruda was officially still a representative of the Chilean government.
He went on to write a total of twenty-one poems in reaction to the war, contained in his book España en el corazón (Spain in the Heart). They later formed part of The Third Residence. This poetry was received so enthusiastically that in 1938 the Spanish Republican Army printed it with the help of Neruda’s friend, the printer and publisher of Caballo verde para la poesía, Manuel Altolaguirre, in the Montserrat monastery, right behind the front lines. Altolaguirre wrote later that Republican “soldiers were working in the mill on the day that the paper for Pablo’s book was made. They didn’t just use the raw materials provided by the Commissariat (cotton and cloth); the soldiers also threw clothing, bandages, trophies of war, an enemy flag, and the shirt of a Moorish prisoner into the pulp.” (This image might be too romantic to be true; the tale is hard to believe considering the difficulties inherent in producing paper from those materials. There’s also the question of whether a paper mill even existed in that area.) Wherever they got their paper from, Republican soldiers set the type, printed it, and took copies of this formidable book of poetry to the front in their backpacks. Alberti, who fought in the civil war, called them “sacred verses for us.” The Commissariat of the eastern division printed the first five hundred copies, including an inscription in tribute to the author following the title page: “The great poet Pablo Neruda, who lived with us during the first months of the war.”
Neruda wasn’t the only poet who channeled his work into the fight to save the Spanish Republic. Others included Langston Hughes and Tristan Tzara, the Romanian French founder of Dada. The English poet W. H. Auden wrote one of the most famous poems of the war, “Spain 1937,” which ends:
The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say alas but cannot help or pardon
César Vallejo, Octavio Paz, and Nicolás Guillén also joined Neruda in writing for Spain. Many Spanish poets formed the center of the effort, mainly those of the Generation of ’27, including Vicente Aleixandre, Miguel Hernández, Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas, and Rafael Alberti. Members of previous generations such as Antonio Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez were also writing poetry against the Fascists. Their involvement was so significant that the Spanish Civil War has
