Spanish Civil War - Two Irish Poets 

Chapter Five of the book revisits the role of Irish writers on the Left and the support they gave to Republican Spain. It focuses in particular on the experience of poets Charles Donnelly and Ewart Milne in the Spanish Civil War and explores the influence of the war on the writings of  a number of Irish poets including Daiken himself and Blanaid Salkeld. 

Many years later, after he retreated from his political choices in the Thirties, Milne would admit that the poems he wrote  in the maelstrom of the Thirties were what was most important to him about the Civil War episode in his life. Yet, for all his tetchy later disavowals of socialism, his stories and poems, forged in the crucible of the war and burned in the memory by the sorrows of loss, form a key part of that small body of Spanish Civil War writing by Irish men and women, texts which also perform acts of witness, memorial, solidarity and elegy.

 Daiken and Milne both wrote elegiac poems about Charles Donnelly, after he was killed at the Battle of Jarama in February 1937. Milne and Donnelly’s own poems were later included in various anthologies of Spanish Civil War verse. Irish women writers were also inspired to write about Spain in the Thirties  and approached the  theme of the war in very different kinds of books. Kate O’Brien and journalist Mairin Mitchell are just two of the women  assessed in relation to their texts about Spain. This little-known aspect of Irish women’s participation in both cultural and activist responses to the cause of Spain allows us to  re consider intersection of gender, politics and literature in a crucial era of left-wing political engagement.