in the Spanish Civil War

In my senior thesis, “On Guard with the Junipers: Ewart Milne and Irish Literary Dissent in the Spanish Civil War, ” I examine the work of little-known poet Ewart Milne (1903-1987). Drawn primarily from his 1940 collection, Letter from Ireland, written after his experience as a medical courier in Spain, these works bridge a divided, isolated Ireland with wider European anti-fascist currents through World War II, Ewart Milne’s writing offers a critical entry into the intellectual protests that surrounded Irish public life in the years surrounding the Spanish Civil War.1 As a contributor to the short-lived journal Ireland Today, Milne became part of a circle of disaffected artists whose protests and causes encompassed all areas of Irish affairs: agrarian reforms, Gaelicization, the Catholic church, and developing cultural organizations. But most pressingly, the journal mingled these domestic cultural commitments with uncompromising engagement in European politics. Left-leaning, opposed to the institutionalization of religion in public life, and open to British, Spanish, and other international literary influences, Ireland Today assembled Ireland’s most prominent intellectuals, poets, and essayists in a broad project of national renewal. This magazine seems to have acted as a conscious counterpoint to Ireland’