The Word and the War: ‘Soft Power’ and ‘Hard Power’ in Three Republican Poems of the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

In this article three poems, by Miguel Hernández, Manuel Altolaguirre and Antonio Machado written in support of the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War, are discussed and compared in light of Nye’s thesis on ‘soft power’ and ‘hard power’. Whiston shows that the exuberant imagery through which their message of mainly ‘soft power’, with some ‘hard power’ thrown in, is communicated, has enabled these political poems to transcend the anecdotal circumstances—an accident with dynamite, a man’s death in action, a colonel’s letter from the battle-front—which had inspired their composition.

Key words:

• Spanish Civil War
• Spain’s Second Republic
• Early 20^th-century Spanish poetry
• political poetry
• Miguel Hernández
• Manuel Altolaguirre
• Antonio Machado
• ‘Rosario dinamitera’
• ‘A Saturnino Ruiz
• obrero impresor’
• ‘A Líster
• jefe en los ejércitos del Ebro’
• ‘Soft Power’ and ‘Hard Power’
• Joseph S. Nye
• Jr

Notes

1 See, for instance, James Whiston, Antonio Machado’s Writings and the Spanish Civil War, Hispanic Studies TRAC (Textual Research and Criticism) 10 (Liverpool: Liverpool U. P., 1996).

2 The quotation comes from Galerías, poema LXXVII, ‘Es una tarde cenicienta y mustia’, in Antonio Machado, Soledades. Galerías. Otros poemas, ed., prólogo & notas de Geoffrey Ribbans (Barcelona: Editorial Labor, 1975), 186–87. All translations into English from this or the other works studied are as supplied by James Whiston.

3 See Joseph S. Nye Jr, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power, 2^nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1991 [1^st ed., 1990]), and, by the same author, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).

4 Nye, Bound to Lead, 32.

5 Nye, Soft Power, xx.

6 Miguel Hernández, ‘Rosario, dinamitera’, from Viento del pueblo (1937). See Miguel Hernández, El rayo que no cesa; Viento del pueblo; El silbo vulnerado (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1963), 112–13.

7 Manuel Altolaguirre, ‘A Saturnino Ruiz, obrero impresor’ (1936), published in Romancero de la Guerra Civil, selección, intro. & notas de Francisco Caudet (Madrid: Ediciones de la Torre, 1978), 82.

8 Xon de Ros, The Poetry of Antonio Machado: Changing the Landscape (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2015).

9 See Antonio Machado, ‘A Líster, jefe en los ejércitos del Ebro’, in the anthology of Fernando Díaz-Plaja, Los poetas en la guerra civil española (Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 1976), 91–92.

10 Antonio Machado, ‘Sobre la defensa y la difusión de la cultura. Discurso pronunciado en Valencia en la sesión de clausura del Congreso Internacional de Escritores’ (1937), in Poesía y prosa. Antología, selección, intro. & notas de Cristina Sisca de Viale (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Colihue, 1991), 139–43 (p. 141).

11 For insight into Machado’s radicalized stance in his final years and his enthusiastic response to calls from the Popular Front for intellectuals to be ‘milicianos de la cultura’, see Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, ‘Gotas de sangre jacobina’, in Hoy es siempre todavía. Curso Internacional sobre Antonio Machado. Córdoba, 7–11 de noviembre de 2005, coord. Jordi Doménech (Sevilla: Renacimiento/Córdoba: Ayuntamiento de Córdoba, 2006), 469–97.

12 Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on Their Works, ed., with intro. & notes, by Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), I, 200.

13 William Shakespeare, Henry V, ed., with an intro., by Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1982), ‘Prologue’, 91–93 (pp. 92–93).

14 Abraham Lincoln, ‘The Gettysburg Address’, delivered on the battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on 19 November 1863; transcript made available by Cornell University at <http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/gettysburg/good_cause/transcript.htm> (accessed 16 November 2018).

15 This phrase—or variants of it—is used by many authors. For instance, in the regular column George Orwell did for the Tribune (1943–1947), he wrote ‘[h]istory is written by the winners’ (see ‘As I Please’, Tribune, 4 February 1944), <http://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/essay/tribune/AsIPlease19440204.html> (accessed 16 November 2018).

16 ‘Entrevista con Ilya Ehrenburg’ (December 1938), in Antonio Machado, Poesía y prosa, ed., con intro., de Oreste Macrì con la colaboración de Gaetano Chiappini, 4 vols (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe/Fundación Antonio Machado, 1989), IV, 2300.

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the editors.