John Cornford

Rupert John Cornford (27 December 1915 – 28 December 1936) was an English poet and communist.

During the first year of the Spanish Civil War, he was a member of the POUM militia and later the International Brigades.

He died while fighting against the Nationalists, at Lopera, near Córdoba.

Cornford was the son of Francis Cornford and Frances Cornford (née Darwin), and was a great-grandson of Charles Darwin and Emma Darwin.

He was born in Cambridge, and named after Rupert Brooke, who was a friend of his parents, but preferred to use his second name.

His younger brother Christopher grew up to be an artist and writer.

Cornford was educated at King's College School, Cambridge, Stowe School and Trinity College, Cambridge.

He began writing poetry at the age of fourteen, strongly influenced by Robert Graves and W. H. Auden, and as a schoolboy argued fiercely about poetry with his mother, a member of the more sedate "Georgian" group whose most famous representative was A. E. Housman.

He spent a year in London studying at the London School of Economics and becoming a speaker and organiser for the Young Communists.

At Cambridge as an undergraduate, reading history, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain.

He was two or three years younger than the group of Trinity College communists including Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean, Kim Philby and James Klugmann.

Another Cambridge student, who would play a major part in his life, was Margot Heinemann, a fellow Communist.

They were lovers and he addressed poems and letters to her.

He had previously been in a relationship with a Welsh woman, Rachel (Ray) Peters, with whom he had a child, James Cornford, later adopted by John's parents.

A photograph of Peters and Cornford can be found at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

He attended Stowe, a new and very liberal school, only from August 1929 to January 1933—hardly more than three years.

By the middle of his seventeenth year he was living in London, attending the London School of Economics, and was a committed Communist organiser and speaker.

British critic Stan Smith, in his essay "'Hard As the Metal of My Gun': John Cornford's Spain", undertakes a detailed reading of "Full Moon at Tierz" that brings out its complexity and ambivalence.

The poem begins with a Marxist and modernist vision of history as a mountain glacier where "[t]ime was inches, dark was all" until it reaches "[t]he dialectic's point of change" and "crashes in light and minutes to its fall."

Now "Time present is a cataract whose force Breaks down the banks even at its source… And we must swing it to its final course."

Certainly, despite its far wider focus and dense philosophical imagery, the poem so far is, like Newbolt's, an expression of determination, as the final stanza of this section shows:

While "Time future, has no image in space"—it doesn't yet exist—Cornford asserts that "We are the future."

But the future is also both "crooked" and "straight": that is, the fight is straightforward, but the road to the future he and his comrades embody is crooked, winding, uncertain.

The second part of the poem is a complex and highly referential reflection on the then-recent history of the Communist movement.

Cornford believes that the new policies of the Communist International (about which Smith argues, he has serious doubts) will be tested in practice:

From 1933 he was directly involved in Communist Party work in London, and became associated with Harry Pollitt, the General Secretary of the CPGB.

In August 1936, shortly after the start of the Spanish Civil War, he travelled to Barcelona and joined the POUM militia, serving briefly on the Aragon front where he wrote his three most famous poems including the often-reprinted "To Margot Heinemann" (originally simply entitled Poem).

The following month he returned to England, where he recruited twenty-one British volunteers, including Bernard Knox, John Sommerfield, Chris Thorneycroft and Griffin Maclaurin.

With this group he travelled to Paris and then on to Albacete, where they joined the International Brigades—the nucleus of what would become the British Section.

He served with a machine-gun unit of the Commune de Paris Battalion, and fought alongside a number of other British volunteers in the defence of Madrid through November and December 1936, including Esmond Romilly.

Having transferred to the recently formed British Battalion, he was killed in uncertain circumstances at Lopera, near Córdoba.

Cornford's poem Full Moon At Tierz (1937) is a literary expression of the anti-fascist cause.

It has been said of Cornford, specifically in relation to this poem, that as a poet he was not a modernist.

A memorial volume to Cornford was published in 1938.

As Stephen Spender observed in his review of the book, "Cornford's life speaks for itself in a way that burns the imagination ... The fact that Cornford lived and that others like him still live, is an important lesson to the leaders of democracies. It shows that people will live and die and fight for democracy if it gives them the justice and freedom which are worth fighting for."

One justification for this claim is the following passage from George Orwell's 1940 essay "My Country Right or Left":

"'Let anyone compare the poem John Cornford wrote not long before he was killed ('Before the Storming of Huesca') with Sir Henry Newbolt's ‘There's a breathless hush in the close tonight’. Put aside the technical differences, which are merely a matter of period, and it will be seen that the emotional content of the two poems is almost exactly the same. The young Communist who died heroically in the International Brigade was public school to the core. He had changed his allegiance but not his emotions.'"

Far from being dismissive, this is actually approving.

Orwell is claiming that emotions like school spirit and patriotism—deep allegiances—can shift from one cause to another, from conservatism to revolution, and be just as sincere.

However, Cornford was never a conventional public-school boy.