IN 1936 the writer Jack Lindsay came across a review in the Times Literary Supplement of This Final Crisis by Daily Worker journalist Allen Hutt.

The reviewer dismissed Hutt’s arguments about the history of Chartism on the grounds that no communist could ever really understand the nature of the English people.

Lindsay wrote a long poem in reply. Who are the English? celebrates and invokes radical and revolutionary movements in English history.
Published in the magazine Left Review and issued as a pamphlet, it was staged as a “mass declamation” at Unity Theatre in London a few weeks later.

In it, Lindsay makes an appeal:
“I call on those who left the little farms/and left the common lands at Parliament’s voice/to chase the grave and comely henpecked king./I call on Cromwell’s Ironsides and the men/who listened to the many voices blown, distracted,/birdcries out of the thicket of blood-darkness.../Come, you Anabaptists and you Levellers,/come, you Muggletonians, all you Bedlamites.../Come, you Luddites, come you men of the Charter,/singing your songs of defiance on the blackened hills...”

The question: “Who are the English?” was of particular importance to Lindsay, since he had only recently emigrated to Britain. Born in 1900 in Melbourne, Australia, his father was the renowned and controversial painter Norman Lindsay.

After reading Classics at university, Lindsay moved to London in 1926, where he established the Fanfrolico Press and the London Aphrodite. Neither press nor magazine were successful and, unable to afford the passage home, Lindsay retreated to the West Country, where he wrote poetry, fiction, biography, philosophy, translations and children’s stories. He never returned to Australia.

Who Are the English? marked a significant shift in Lindsay’s interests away from the classical world and towards English history. Over the next few years he wrote a trilogy of historical novels about the English radical tradition, 1649, Lost Birthright and Men of ’48.

It also brought Lindsay into contact with leading communist writers like Edgell Rickword and Randall Swingler, with whom he was to work closely in the pages of Left Review, Poetry and People and Our Time.

In 1939 Lindsay and Rickword edited the influential Left Book Club anthology A Handbook of Freedom and, sometime in 1941, Lindsay joined the Communist Party.

Writing for a new and wider audience meant writing in a new way, in a voice that was both plainer and more rhetorical, declamatory, urgent and public, addressing the series of political crises through which he lived.

During the 1930s, Lindsay’s poetry was preoccupied with the struggle against European fascism, particularly in Spain, the subject of two of his best-known mass declamations, Requiem Mass for Englishmen Fallen in the International Brigade and On Guard for Spain:
“I speak for the Spanish people to the workers of the world./Men and women, come out of the numbered cells/of harsh privation, mockingly called your homes,/break through the deadening screen with your clenched fists,/unrope the bells that jangle in the steeple of the sky,/make the least gap of silence in the wall of day/and you will hear the guns in Spain.”

By the 1940s, Lindsay was a senior figure in the Communist Party’s cultural life, a crucial link with mainstream literary London and with distinguished communist writers in Europe.

He attended the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wroclaw, the Paris Peace Congress, the Pushkin celebrations in the Soviet Union and the second Soviet writers’ congress. A hostile review in 1952 in the TLS of a book by Lindsay concluded by calling for a purge of Communist Party members from British universities.

During these years, Lindsay’s poetry was unavoidably shaped by the events of the cold war, notably the war in Korea, the peace movement and the civil war in Greece:

“We bring you a song of the Greeks on the hills of hell/We bring you a song of the Greeks in the perilous passes/a song of pity, a stubborn song of glory./Flash out, courageous sword on the crag of the day./When Greece is free, the shadow will pass away./Peace will be in our hands. Peace will be strong./O open your hearts to the hands of our beating song./Let Greece be free again. Let Greece be free.”

He wrote a number of long letters in verse to other communist writers like Pablo Neruda, Alexander Fadayev, Paul Eluard, Bertholt Brecht, Ilya Ehrenburg and Nikolai Tikhonov. Although many of the party’s best writers left it in 1956, including several of Lindsay’s closest friends, he remained in the party until his death in 1990:

“We were looking another way/when the bomb blew up the bridge,/blew up all bridges, it seemed./We stood in abject dismay/on an island of devastation./All familiar shapes were dimmed... The road was there, baffled and torn,/glimpsed and then brokenly lost,/with all ditches and dangers crisscrossed/in its zigzag towards the unknown./Yet I saw how it led on ahead./I saw there was no turning-back./I was one of a host, and alone./Alone, I was one of a host.”

Who Are the English? Selected Poems 1935-81 Jack Lindsay is published by Smokestack Books at £8.95, www.smokestack-books.co.uk