By Leo Mellor
From fires to ghosts, and from plants to surrealist apparitions, the bombsites of London have been either unsettling and encouraging terrains. but during the years ahead of the second one international battle, British tradition was once already choked with ruins and fragments. They seemed as content material, with visions of tottering towers and scraps of paper; and in addition as shape, within the shapes of damaged poetics. yet from the outbreak of the second one international warfare what have been a cultured mode started to resemble a proleptic template. in the course of that clash many modernist writers - reminiscent of Graham Greene, Louis MacNeice, David Jones, J. F. Hendry, Elizabeth Bowen, T. S. Eliot and Rose Macaulay - engaged with devastated cityscapes and the altered lives of a country at battle. to appreciate the efficiency of the bombsites, either within the moment international battle and after, analyzing the Ruins brings jointly poetry, novels and brief tales, in addition to movie and visible paintings.
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Example text
In ‘Funeral Eulogy on Garcia Lorca’ there are no blooded archetypes. Rather there is a singular influential presence, a real poet to be mourned: Fredrico Garcia Lorca. Shot by the fascists in Grenada in 1936, Lorca had, 30 Reading the Ruins posthumously, gained a wider British readership, and his death was seen as the ultimate cultural proof of the Nationalists’ barbarity. Again, as with others of Barker’s prose texts from 1938–9, this is a densely compact piece, with a highly abrasive tone and continually up-ratcheted emotion, lauding the poet as the ‘rarest and most prized of humans’ before trying to lay out what meaning could be gleaned from his death.
There was rhododendrons in the Strand and mammoths in Piccadilly”’ (BTA 29–30). In Autumn Journal time is also mutable, with visits to both a personal and a classical past. 83 For both works there cannot be a still point from which to observe: spatial restlessness is matched by momentary clarity when fear is explicit. And to this is how both works obsess over perception and scale. Woolf’s use of the interaction between the earthbound and the aerial as a zone for both symbolism and also narrative had developed in convoluted ways since Mrs Dalloway.
67 Yet merely to note this is to make an ahistoricist move that elides much. The image also typifies a moment when, with the growth of air power, civilian populations were being targeted, in Abyssinia and China as well as Spain. 69 But its complex afterlife in poetry, and hence in the possibility of finding a form of empathy for victims of bombing, could not have been predicted. In late May 1939, nearly two months after the final surrender of the Spanish Republic, while the newly victorious General Franco was receiving fawning ambassadors from the European powers, and the French government had begun to move from their open-air prison cages the Republican refugees who had fled into southern France, an anonymous Elegy on Spain was published from a Manchester bookshop.