Virginia Woolf's criticism of 1930s poetry as too often an exercise in didacticism is perhaps justified from a global perspective. The overwhelming scale of the fascist threat that arose in Franco's Spain, however, occupies a unique place in the literary history of this era. The Spanish Civil War served as a call to arms that legitimized for many the adoption of a far-left alternative to awaken the closed eyes of many people in Britain and across Europe. As a subject for adopting a loudspeaker mentality, very few moments in modern history are so deserving. What is perhaps lost amid the generalized view of Virginia Woolf is that many of these poets had only one goal to guide them. Far more instructive in analyzing his claim is the way in which talented writers who have chosen to approach the question of radical liberalism have succeeded or failed. The real question to answer is whether active engagement with beliefs is better suited to transforming propaganda into art, or whether the key lies in detached observational analysis. In other words, is propaganda more likely to rise to the level of art if one is fully or only partially committed to the cause? Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"? Get the original essay WH Auden was never a full member of the Communist Party, but like so many artists and intellectuals of the At the time, its response to the widespread advance of fascism was manifested by adherence to certain left-wing ideals commonly associated with the Party. Although the iconic symbol of the dangers of right-wing extremism today is Hitler, Germany and the Nazis, for most of the 1930s the poster child for everything progressive liberalism hated was in Spain and that face was Francisco Franco. The Spanish Civil War fueled many archetypal modernist works of art, from Ernest Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls to Pablo Picasso's immense mural Guernica, none of which can escape the criticism of being at least partly didactic. In the days before the rise of the Soviet Union and the threat of nuclear annihilation, it was not yet dangerous to be a fellow traveler, a communist sympathizer, or just plain red. Seen in this light, Auden's poem "A Communist for Others" should therefore not necessarily be designated by its very title and subject as mere propaganda. If that were the case, it might be considered more highly; as it is, "A Communist for Others" suffers the fate of much proletarian literature in that it is written in the unfortunate tone of an intellectual addressing the ordinary worker while positioning himself like one of them. The consciousness that permeates this poem is fortunately fully aware of this particular paradox: “We cannot put on airs with you / The fears that hurt you hurt us too.” » The speaker acknowledges the distance that exists while promising not to become a simple dialectician leading a seminar on class consciousness. This feeling, however, is undermined by the lines that immediately follow: “Only we say / That like all nightmares, these are false. / If you would help us, we could / Our eyes open and wake / Find night and day. On the surface, these lines seem to indicate that the elitist places himself in a somewhat submissive position, as if asking for help suggests that his capacity is not enough without the help of the comrades to whomwe address. is, however, troubling with regard to Woolf's observation that the poetry of this era often succumbs to the danger of becoming a didactic, secular sermon sanctifying not the opium of the masses, but Marxist theory, like a religious sermon inviting converts potential to Islam. In the word of Jesus Christ, a secular sermon is probably not best served with a generous dose of subtlety. Of course, the interpretation that Auden's poem is a polemic about workers' rights becomes more complex if, as Stephen Spender asserts, the poem is for Auden "an exercise in entering into a point of view which It’s not his.” (Haffenden, 1997, p. 28). Furthermore, Spender argues that this was precisely because Auden was not a communist who could write, but a writer who sympathized with certain aspects of the ideology and who was also aware of its However, seen in this light, the poem is all the more a failure because even a somewhat detached engagement in political propaganda can sometimes seem so blunt, then Woolf's assessment The preachy quality of the. poetry of the 1930s rings true Unfortunately, Spender may have been wrong in saying that a true believer was not better equipped to write about left-wing ideology, which certainly does not help interpret his poetry. as an exercise; in Spender's terms, his poetry should therefore be less successful than Auden in terms of "Full Moon at Tierz", this is debatable. The poem's finale urges readers to "Raise the". red flag triumphantly / For communism and for freedom" certainly sounds like something that could have been lifted straight from Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, or a fiery speech by Lenin from 1917, the elegant nuance of which preceding makes Auden's detachment all the more didactic in comparison. “Here too, our freedom weighs on the scales. / O understand before it is too late / Freedom was never won without a fight. / Freedom is an easy word to pronounce” is poetry that, separated from its subject, could be applied to any political literature. In fact, its lyrical quality is closer to an anthem. Or maybe a love poem. This is the missing ingredient in Auden and Cornford's "communist" poem and it constitutes the crux of the problem with Spender's assertion. While there is no doubt that a committed communist can put ideology before art, the same can be said of any poet and any strongly held belief. What Woolf's critique actually means is that modernist poets had to turn their backs on Romanticism as part of their efforts to define themselves by what they were not. Poets of this era witnessed astonishing technological achievements as well as incredible horrors. As a result, the literature of this period was typically pessimistic and sometimes deeply cynical. It was an appeal to the masses who had been hypnotized by technological progress, but who were too quick to suppress the unspeakable evil that could be committed with that technology. In the midst of an alarm signal, there was little time left for flights of fancy like love poems. Instead, the romantic feelings of many 1930s writers were sublimated into a passion to stem the tide of fascism creeping across Europe. In a very real way, “Full Moon at Tierza” is a romantic poem as well as propaganda. The tone is certainly not Woolf's, although her allusions to specific communist events and figures like the Seventh Congress and Dimitrov reject the idea that he is in any waydidactic case. What Cornford does, unlike Auden, is balance the message with vibrant imagery and personal conviction. What is certainly clear is that Cornford believes more than Auden; what is clear is that Cornford sincerely views the communist cause as a means of establishing equality. His adherence to the ideology is on full display in “Full Moon at Tierza” and this adherence brings about another supremely important difference between Cornford and Auden; one that completely undermines Spender's argument. The language and images of “Full Moon at Tierza” are the work of someone who not only writes about her beliefs, but cherishes them as another person might cherish their lover. More than that, Cornford saw them. Cornford's communist beliefs are based on the fact that he was also an activist, and saw with his own eyes the horror of the adversary. If Auden's poem sounds like an elitist speaking to the working class, Cornford's feels like a worker speaking lovingly about the possibility of achieving equality with another worker. Like any good propagandist or preacher, in this poem Cornford, proving Spender wrong, combines the broader ideological message with its expected didactic qualities with a much more subtle personal message of conviction. With “Full Moon at Tierza,” John Cornford provides enough evidence to tarnish the clear tone of truth of Woolf’s assertion. What is even more unfortunate from Woolf's and Spender's point of view is that Cornford is able to achieve the same effect even when his language is stripped of its romantic qualities and he acts like a journalist. When “A Letter from Aragon” is analyzed alongside “Full Moon at Tierza,” it becomes evident that in the hands of a true believer, eclipses form. In style, Aragon seems to have much more in common with Auden's poem than with Tierza. Both are clearly propagandistic and polemical, and both affirm the causes of liberalism. But while Auden's rhetoric lacks a fiery center and betrays his alienation from the words he writes, Cornford's admittedly preachy content turns into an undeniably scathing call to arms that positions the workers of the poem as Auden as potential victims of fascism. There is little evidence here of the romantic imagery that fills Tierza's poem; Cornford proves that even a true believer can view the situation unsentimentally and write about it with passion. That is to say with passionate language. Even though the choice of words in this poem is less elegant than, say, Tiera's "freedom" passage cited above, and even though it often comes across as bare-bones, bare-bones reporting, it nevertheless manages to display the same conviction passionate. contained in Tierza. If "Cornford uses poetry as a vehicle for politics" (Brown 2005: 196), then these poems both serve to illuminate the fact that while all poetry of the 1930s perhaps could not avoid engaging in pedagogy to the detriment of art, this was possible. Because Cornford's two poems are very different in tone, language, and syntax, they represent a strong argument against Woolf's claim. Especially since in the more "romantic" poem, Cornford sometimes introduces more rigorous propagandistic language, including a much less elegant conclusion, and nevertheless manages to make it a love song of communism. Avoiding the romantic indoctrination of a colleague with luscious images in “A Letter from Aragon”, he still manages to convey the same feeling. What is striking about this poem is that although it seems more didactic and propagandistic than "Full Moon in Tierza", it actually contains. 28-29.