65

While writers and intellectuals strongly committed themselves to political ideals during the interwar period, controversies regarding the notion of “pure poetry” emerged in Europe in the 1920s and intensified in the 1930s. This concept is a collective and variable construct that causes controversy in the literary field. Some Marxist poets interpret the notion as a form of a wait-and-see attitude in politics, or even as an acceptance of fascism. This article aims to trace back the dynamics of these controversies through literary reviews and through poets such as B. Brecht, L. Aragon, and W. H. Auden, who were central in the intellectual network of the time. This work shows how they valued an alternative poetics, for instance by interweaving poetry and reporting in works such as Auden’s In Time of War and Aragon’s Hourra l’Oural.