In the interwar years, the most compelling theories of the corrida's origins were those positing prehistoric roots. This chapter will examine several works, especially poems, in which British writers use the bullfight as an image of war, of Spain, of Europe, and of themselves. Like Lawrence, these writers come to the corrida as outsiders, and the sense they are able to make of it is as much the product of their own preoccupations as of the form of the ritual itself. However, the unfamiliar demands placed on their perception by the bullfight lead some of these writers into the ambiguous territory in which the richest idea of Europe often resides. Auden was one among countless British writers in the interwar period to have been moved by the Spanish Civil War and drawn toward it for the way it seemed to concretize personal concerns.