This Ghostly Poetry: History and Memory of Exiled Spanish Republican Poets

The Spanish Civil War was idealized as a poet’s war. The thousands of poems written about the conflict are memorable evidence of poetry’s high cultural and political value in those historical conditions. After Franco’s victory and the repression that followed, numerous Republican exiles relied on the symbolic agency of poetry to uphold a sense of national identity.

Exilic poems are often read as claim-making narratives that fit national literary history. This Ghostly Poetry critiques this c...