According to Wikipedia:
James Findlay Hendry (12 September 1912 – 17 December 1986) was a Scottish poet known also as an editor and writer. He was born in Glasgow, and read Modern Languages at the University of Glasgow. During World War II he served in the Royal Artillery and the Intelligence Corps. After the war he worked as a translator for international organisations, including the UN and the ILO. He later took a chair at Laurentian University. He died in Toronto. He edited with Henry Treece the poetry anthology The New Apocalypse (1939) which gave its name to the New Apocalyptics poetic group. His long poem Marimarusa was published in 1978.
In Valentine Cunningham’s big and compendious anthology, The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, Hendry is represented by a poem which is so striking and so unlike anything else in the book, that it deserves to be preserved and publicised. It’s a vivid description of Picasso’s famous painting, Guernica.
Here’s the painting:
Guernica by Pablo Picasso
And here’s the poem:
Frozen in the fright of light chilled skull and spine
Drip bone-shriek-splinters sharper than the Bren:
Starve franco stroke and starve the hooves of bulls.
I am the arm thrust candle through the wall.
Up cities crack firelaughter, the furious
Minutes and bark a ruin at man in
His sealoneliness; hair rearing finrays.
I am the spinning coil distilled eyes’ iron.
Neigh horse terror through steel teeth and a thicket
Of bricks! Beam an eyebomb, cellar, and stride
Nerve, peeled pupils’ enamel, rhomboid head!
I am the tiled blind hand plunged bulb in socket.
Splint for the shriven shin, I foster mantrump out
Of festered history; sprout pointed fingers
Where an afterbirth is dung-and-rubble-teat.
I am the eyeball blown world! Axis of anger!
Picasso: For Guernica by J.F. Hendry
It’s a valiant attempt to catch in language the wrecked visual onslaught of the painting.
But it also, quite plainly, announces a rejection of the entire world of the thirties poets with their public personas, their concern for clarity and reason and left-wing politics and up-the-workers and pointing fingers at the wretched bourgeoisie.
Instead Hendry is celebrating the exuberant power of the unfettered and private imagination in a tumble of extreme imagery and made-up words, and so marks the end of the Thirties era and the very different feel of the poetry of the 1940s.
Related links
- The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse edited by Valentine Cunningham (1980)
- Poetry of the Thirties edited by Robin Skelton (1964)
- The Auden Generation
Books & Boots 
C A Clarke
/ June 16, 2020A better representation of the fragmentation of the specific violence of bombardment than the painting, which I have never found convincing as a depiction of the horrors of war (or bombardment), but does either give a sense of the terror and agony and death of the event? I am nor convinced, although I think Auden’s mellifluous poems about war and violence tell us more about his educated sensibility about war and violence than about them. So that ties in with Picasso: an artist enraptured by bulls, manliness, and myth asked to paint about a bombardment, and giving us this, his fairly trite production. The best thing about it is the horse.