In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1961-2007 by X. J. Kennedy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Reviewed By: Catherine Tufariello I like poems where you don’t really know whether to laugh or cry when you read them. I like what Auden said once, that poetry is the clear expression of mixed [...]

Read: X. J. Kennedy and KidLit I first heard X. J. Kennedy read in West Chester, Pennsylvania. I was in a lecture hall at the local university, weary and dispirited from an overdose of “serious” poetry readings, and I glanced at the doorway, deliberating on whether or not I should make my escape to the [...]

As Reviewed By: Jack Foley Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems. Edited by Charles Bernstein. American Poets Project/The Library of America, 2006. In Ulysses, to depict the babbling of a woman going to sleep, I had sought to end with the least forceful word I could possibly find. I had found the word ‘yes,’ which is barely pronounced, [...]

In Memoriam: Anthony Hecht (1923-2004) As Reviewed By: Preston Merchant When Anthony Hecht first came to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference to teach a summer workshop in the early 1990′s, one of his students was particularly eager to meet him. The man had been a pilot in Vietnam. On one mission, he had lodged a copy [...]

Travel Writing and the Canon Like many odd literary creatures from the British 1930’s, W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice’s Letters from Iceland (1936) is referred to more frequently as a representative period piece than as an achieved work of art. As Tim Youngs notes, in his essay on Auden’s travel writing in the recent Cambridge [...]

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”).

An Interview with Jon Stallworthy Interview By: Sunil Iyengar Jon Stallworthy’s blood quickened after a poetry reading he gave earlier this year, not because he admired his own recitative powers, but because of something an audience member told him. This man, who turned out to be Stephen Spender’s nephew, had found a sheaf of letters [...]

Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice edited by Peter McDonald. Faber and Faber, 2007. 836 pages. As Reviewed By: Maria Johnston In a note on Louis MacNeice’s poetry penned in 1964, Louise Bogan observed that, “the Collected Poems 1925-1948 should, although not so arranged, be read in chronological order, for it is an added pleasure to [...]

As Reviewed By: Katy Evans-Bush In 1963, after Louis MacNeice’s premature death of pneumonia, Philip Larkin wrote that “his poetry was the poetry of our everyday life, of shop-windows, traffic policemen, ice-cream soda, lawn-mowers, and an uneasy awareness of what the news-boys were shouting . . . he displayed a sophisticated sentimentality about falling leaves [...]

As Reviewed By: John Drexel “The Sunlight on the Garden” by Louis MacNeice The sunlight on the garden Hardens and grows cold, We cannot cage the minute Within its nets of gold; When all is told We cannot beg for pardon. Our freedom as free lances Advances towards its end; The earth compels, upon it [...]