“You, the strongest building, have collapsed.” That line from Miguel Hernández to Federico García Lorca in 1936 echoes the shock of a poet who, though unsettled by the Granada writer’s death, would not surrender to the chaos of war or the longer madness of history. In the prologue to Teatro en la guerra (1937), Hernández offers his weapons—poetry and song—as a defense: a fence around war that, even in peace, remains a weapon, though it lies still at times.
The War Book gathers Hernández’s vast output from 1935 to 1942, the year of his death. Elena Medel organizes the material into three movements: Pre-war, War years, and Post-war, placing a foreword, a bibliography, a curated selection of poems, and photographs from those years alongside the texts.
Hernández wrote with tireless energy, especially in 1936 when the prospect of victory still felt within reach. He shifts from buoyant optimism to mounting discouragement, and through the pages assembled here readers can trace both a path of hope and the wartime evolution he witnessed. The collection blends poems with plays, reportage, exhortations for the Republican cause, and numerous letters that place the poet across different fronts on the peninsula.
Miguel Hernandez INFORMATION
The short play The Tail, staged on a Madrid street amid the war, was performed at the front to bolster the troops. In the accompanying film, a character named Anne accuses the women of stirring unnecessary turmoil, arguing that Madrid cannot afford to reveal such spectacle to a world watching with rapt attention. The year was 1937, and Hernández still clung to the belief in victory. Medel notes that during these years he wrote several plays that would not see their world premiere until after his lifetime.
The struggle pressed on into 1938; food grew scarcer, troops weakened, and the war’s human cost sharpened into hunger, injury, and imprisonment. The poem “Hunger,” published in The Man Stalks in 1939, comes from this period, and its closing stanza offers a universal elegy: “Help me to be a man: don’t let me be fierce, hungry, violent, besieged forever.”
The letters to his partner Josefina Manresa deepen this portrait. On September 1, 1939, he writes of onion smells from home and the hope that a child will be fed, sharing companionable verses he prepared for the child. These lines belong to the famous poem “Onion Lullabies.”
Recurring themes surface in his writings: the laboring poor, the field workers, the women who endure the crushing weight of oppression, and the countless moments when the poet walked through Spain and bore witness to those who fought, dreamed, and died. From Castile’s plains to Extremadura’s stones, Andalusia’s olive groves, and Asturias’s mineral hills, the poet’s gaze remained anchored in the people he observed. This sentiment is echoed in the piece “Today’s Companion,” signed under the pseudonym Antonio López.
Political circumstances pushed Hernández to travel—through Paris and Stockholm to Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev in 1937—to report and reflect in letters to his wife. He jokes about dressing as an ambassador for the Spanish Republicans, about the discomfort of wearing shoes instead of espadrilles, and about the stubborn appetite he cannot quite satisfy. He also visits a school for evacuated Spanish children in Moscow, noting that they are well cared for and lacking nothing.
The War Book contains only two letters from 1939, written to Captain Esteban and to José María de Cossío, in which Hernández asks for money and food in hard times. It was during these years of need that he produced poems such as “Mother Spain” and “The Last Song.” In the former, he crystallizes his feeling at the war’s end: Spain, a stubborn stone split and bleeding, yet a land to which his heart remains bound. He writes that his deepest wish, beyond dying for his country, is for his wife and son to be sheltered as they pass by the place where his homeland began.
“The Last Song” acts as a gentler epitaph—an elegy that closes with the word “hope,” tempered by a quiet wish to be released. One stanza sums the mood: around the body the sheet rises, night is dense and fragrant, and the living cling to memory as the world moves on.
The final section of the book covers the post-war years, 1939–1941, when Hernández writes to friends imprisoned across various sites, seeking help or conveying care for his family left behind. Though some friendships fray, others endure: Vicente Aleixandre, Pablo Neruda, and José María de Cossío remain close, while the Chilean poet Juvencio Valle is among those with whom Hernández had previously collaborated before the conflict. The poet’s letters reveal a mind still at work, preparing material for Espasa-Calpe.
At first Hernández resisted exile in Latin America and later refused release from prison to avoid entangling others with his misfortune. He eventually died in an Alicante prison from tuberculosis, his sentence commuted to thirty years. His last requests center on honor for his son and wife, rather than personal comfort, and a plea that his family not despair as they carry his memory forward.
The poet’s family letters render a lucid portrait of a life lived under extreme pressure. His dramas and essays reveal a person who refused to surrender to social realities, while his poems—widely included in this War Book—carry a universal message shaped by his peasant origins, his connection to the land, and his responsibility to a nation in upheaval. He tended goats, felled trees, walked front lines in espadrilles, and wore sturdy shoes when needed, guiding readers away from indifference toward a deeper sense of human endurance across a fractured continent.