WRITERS AND POLITICS
365
with the other Siegfried, we are also left with a further question on
our hands-wasn't this Siegfried after all a bit stupid?
John Cornford was priggish but not at all stupid, and it is this
which in the end makes him more interesting than Bell. He was a
Greek hero rather than a c.onfused Wagnerian one, his specialty
be–
ing the cutting through of Gordian knots. He dealt with family, school,
Cambridge, love affairs, the problems dividing the poet from the man
of action, all in the same way-cut right through them with the steel
blade of objective action. As between poetry and fighting in Spain,
he decidedly chose the latter, after he left Cambridge:
Poetry had become a marginal activity, and a private one. He
never discussed his work with his friends in the party; most of
them did not even know until after his death that he had been
a poet.... In the rare moments when he was free to do so,
he wrote both personal and political poems. The latter repre–
sents a conscious effort to "objectify" his ideas and attitudes
as a revolutionary participator, and to transform them into
revolutionary poetry.
Instead of being, like Julian Bell, a poet partly stifled in his work
by
his need to take action in circumstances which cried out for it, he
put poetry aside and immersed himself in the war, but from this, and
out of the ideology with which he tempered his will and determination,
a hard clear new poetry of the objective will began to emerge. He
writes sketchily, tentatively but effectively, as someone dominated by
the Communist idea of transforming the dialectic into history-ham–
mered out of his mind and body occupied at the given moment in
doing just this:
The past, a glacier, gripped the mountain wall,
And time was inches, dark was all.
But here it scales the end of the range,
The dialectic's point of change,
Crashes in light and minutes to its fall.
Time present is a cataract whose force
Breaks down the banks even at its source
And history forming in our hands
Not plasticine but roaring sands,
Yet we must swing it to its final course.
The attempt here is to write a secular Communist poetry cor–
responding to religious metaphysical poetry. It is blurred perhaps
be–
cause Marxism, in common with other analytic and scientific systems,
cannot be taken outside its own method and terms, and interpreted
