Valentine Cunningham and the Poetry of the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

There has recently been published an anthology of Spanish civil war poetry edited by Valentine Cunningham (Penguin, 1980): the first comprehensive collection so far made. Many of the poems have, of course, appeared previously: Stephen Spender and John Lehman edited Poems For Spain in 1939; Robin Skelton's useful Poetry of the Thirties (Penguin, 1964) included a section on Spain; and there have been separate collections of individual poets. This new anthology, however, includes much that has been out of print for many years, and it also contains a good deal of new material, the prison poems of Clive Branson being among the most notable.