Another Cambridge student, who would play a major part in his life, was Margot Heinemann, the future historian. They were lovers, and he addressed both poems and surviving letters to her.
From 1933 he was directly involved in Communist Party work, in London, and becoming involved with Harry Pollitt. During the Spanish Civil War he both recruited in Cambridge for the International Brigade, and fought himself: firstly though he was in a POUM unit in Aragon in August 1936, before returning home, and coming back in December. He was killed at Lopera, near Madrid.
In poetic terms, he was no modernist; as George Orwell pointed out in 1940, he represented continuity with the older, imperial tradition.
Works
Understand the Weapon, Understand the Wound: Selected Writings of John Cornford (1976) edited by Jonathan Galassi
When in the autumn of 1933 I went up to St. John's college in Cambridge, Hitler was already dictator of Germany and had begun his program of militarization of the country; the prospect of a renewed European war was now a grim reality.
Before we left, I had gone with John to visit his father in Cambridge; he was the distinguished Greek scholar Francis MacDonald Cornford, author of brilliant books on Attic comedy, Thucydides and Greek philosophy, and Plato.
He gave it to John, and I had to smuggle it through French Customs at Dieppe, for John's passport showed entry and exit stamps from Port-Bou and his bags were likely to be given a thorough going-over.
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