Homage to Catalonia 1943. The closing phrase of the poem, "No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit", was later taken by George Woodcock for the title of his Governor General's Award-winning critical study of Orwell and his work, "The Crystal Spirit" (1966). Homage to Catalonia Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations fighting for the Republican army during the Spanish Civil War. The war was one of the shaping events on his political outlook and a significant part of what led him to write, in 1946, "Every line of serious work that I have written
Foreign involvement in the Spanish Civil War countries selling arms to republican side included Czechoslovakia and Estonia. $2,000,000 came from the United States for humanitarian purposes. Volunteers from many countries fought in Spain, most of them on the Republican side. About 32,000 men and women fought in the International Brigades, including the American Lincoln Battalion and the Canadian Mackenzie–Papineau Battalion, organized in close conjunction with the Comintern to aid the Spanish Republicans. Perhaps another 3,000 fought as members of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) militias. Those fighting with POUM most famously included George Orwell and the small ILP