 Introduction By: |
The Louis MacNeice Special Issue
|
Introduction By: |
The Louis MacNeice Special Issue
|
Just
as Ben Jonson bore the unfortunate fate of living in what would become
known as the “Age of Shakespeare,” Louis MacNeice lives in the long
shadow thrown by his exact contemporary, W.H. Auden, who dominated his
generation of poets and gave a name to the “Age of Anxiety” (Auden’s
book of that title begat a symphony by Leonard Bernstein, secured a
Pulitzer Prize for the recently naturalized poet, and was hailed by the
New York Public Library as one of the most influential books of the last
century). Together they suffered the temporary indignity of being joined
as ingredients of “MacSpaunday,” the belittling coinage devised by
critic Roy Campbell in his book Flowering Rifle. He amalgamated the
names of the four Oxford “thirties poets” who were frequently, and
unfairly, thought of as indistinguishable (anti-modernist in poetics,
leftist in politics): Louis MacNeice (“Mac”), Stephen Spender
(“sp”), W. H. Auden (“au-n”), and Cecil Day-Lewis (“day”). It
has become increasingly clear in recent decades that MacNeice, once
consigned to the lower three-quarters of this composite caricature, has
much more to offer than those who comprise the bottom half. Spender will
likely be remembered largely on the strength of his mid-life memoir World
Within World, though he proved peerless when posing in the role of
dapper English poet, whether taking tea at an English lawn party or more
potent tipples at lunch with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (in some quarters,
his fabulous lifestyle earned him the derisive label “toady,” and, a
real stinger, the “Rupert Brooke of the Depression”). Cecil Day-Lewis
is still thought of as a charming but not terribly important poet,
remembered for his honest and ironic reworking of Christopher Marlowe’s
“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (which most readers will
recognize by its first line, “Come, live with me and be my love”) and
his translations of Virgil’s Georgics and Aeneid. MacNeice
is a separate case, and, while relegated to second place in the pantheon
of English “thirties poets,” he is a much closer second than had
earlier been imagined. In fact, it seems that if there is a chasm dividing
the talents of his generation MacNeice stands on the same rim as Auden,
waving to the remaining two across the way. Although his poetry gradually
suffered as he took more assignments from the BBC—radio plays and other
“hack work,” as he termed it, to keep body and soul together—he
nonetheless assembled a remarkable oeuvre by the time of his death (his
newest Collected runs to 800 pages). In 1963, he succumbed to viral
pneumonia contracted while wandering the moors in a rainstorm after
spelunking in a Yorkshire cave to gather sound effects for his last radio
play, Persons from Porlock. His
poetry is musical and humane, possessed of wit, flair, and exuberance.
From his first published work Blind Fireworks (now considered
juvenilia) in 1929 to the immediately posthumous Burning Perch in
1963 (published only days after his funeral) he brought out no fewer than
fifteen volumes of poetry (if one includes Letters from Iceland,
co-written with his coeval Auden). His book-length poem, Autumn Journal,
is generally viewed as one of the great interwar English poems, presaging
both fascist victory in Spain and German bombs raining on London. His
short, singing lyric “The Sunlight on the Garden” is a startling,
small masterpiece that encapsulates the alarm of a generation preparing
for war while courting nostalgia as it bids farewell to peace and youth.
Born in Belfast, tutored at Marlborough and Merton College, Oxford, a
resident of Birmingham and London, eventually a world traveler, MacNeice
has always straddled the trenches that define English, Irish, and, of
course, British poetry of the last century. This has only added to his
appeal. As
an undergraduate, I was obsessed with MacNeice. My mania was so acute that
I actually recorded tapes of myself reading his poetry to play back while
driving. Years later, when I excavated one such tape from my mother’s
attic, it took me a moment to place the strangely beautiful words. The
unmarked Maxell cassette tape contained my reading of “Eclogue for
Christmas,” one of several eclogues composed by MacNeice. It is a stark,
modernist interpretation of the ancient bucolic form, retrofitted for a
restless century. I found it rousing and at times terrifying. A friend in
London recently told me she could “barely even read” the poem: “I
find it so chilling; the language is so charged.” Permit me to reproduce
the first lines of the long poem: A: I meet you in an evil time. B. The evil bells Put out of our heads, I think, the thought of everything else. A. The jaded calendar revolves, Its nuts need oil, carbon chokes the valves, The excess sugar of a diabetic culture Rotting the nerve of life and literature; Therefore when we bring out the old tinsel and frills To announce that Christ is born among the barbarous hills I turn to you whom a morose routine Saves from the mad vertigo of being what has been. B. Analogue of me, you are wrong to turn to me, My
country will not yield you any sanctuary [. . .] This
is simply stunning, by my lights, and unreservedly modern, in the best
sense. When
I went abroad to study at Oxford University for my master’s degree and
doctorate in English Literature, I was lucky to work closely with Jon
Stallworthy. He is perhaps best known in this country as one of the
principal editors of the Norton Anthology of Poetry and author of
the authoritative (and first comprehensive) biography of First World War
poet Wilfred Owen. In Britain, he is also known as the author of numerous
collections of poetry. In the mid-nineties, he published his second
biography, on Louis MacNeice. The publication was attended by some
ballyhoo. I remember strolling one misty evening through the streets of
Oxford. I noticed large placards in a bookstore window announcing the
book’s publication. Alongside a prominent, and quite striking,
photograph of the poet were two lines from his haunting poem
“Autobiography”: “When I was five the black dreams came; / Nothing
after was quite the same.” I was gripped. I felt immediately at home.
The Stallworthy biography was widely praised, and it helped to fetch
MacNeice his rightful place in our accounts of modern poetry. I am happy
to see that the amplification of MacNeice’s reputation and legacy
continues apace. In
his centenary year, I am delighted to have assembled a special issue
devoted entirely to the life and works of MacNeice. Our London
correspondent, Katy Evans-Bush, retraces MacNeice’s steps in her study
of Autumn Journal. Visiting the poem’s locales in season, she
notes that the trees are still gone from Primrose Hill, cleared before the
war to allow anti-aircraft guns “to take the view.” She explains that
MacNeice was “very much a man of his own time
and his own daily, physical world¾an
anti-‘Romantic’ sensibility that can be found in poets from Catullus
to the New York School.” John
Drexel explains why “The Sunlight on the Garden” has remained such an
admired and effective poem, showing us that when “read as a whole rather
than as merely the sum of its parts, ‘Sunlight on the Garden’ operates
so brilliantly on so many levels that it amply illustrates Eliot’s
observation that ‘genuine poetry can communicate before it is
understood.’” Our
Washington correspondent, Sunil Iyengar, traces MacNeice’s life through
the lens of Jon Stallworthy’s superb biography, advising that “in this
year of Auden’s and MacNeice’s centennials, we may as well acknowledge
that the singular example of Auden—chimera, virtuoso, polymath—may be
hazardous for most young poets, who would do better to pursue MacNeice’s
steadfast aim of writing good and often great poems.” Our
Irish correspondent, Maria Johnston, considers the importance of the
long-awaited publication of MacNeice’s Collected Poems (available
from Faber in London; the last collected was issued in 1966, edited by E.
R. Dodds, revised 1979). She reminds us “MacNeice’s influence on contemporary poets has been born out of
his own deep engagements with elsewheres, his vast scope and his deep
sense of the complexities of human existence.” Finally, controversial young critic James Matthew Wilson looks back at Letters to Iceland as literary travel book, experimental hybrid, and summation of the “essence of artistic modernism,” a bookend to the age begun by Eliot in 1922 with The Waste Land, and a kind of “final masterpiece that takes [earlier modernist works] all for granted and looks behind and beyond them with a skeptical eye.” With all best wishes, Ernest Hilbert Editor, Contemporary Poetry Review |