Louis MacNeice: Commentary

W. B. Yeats, Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), ‘Day Lewis, Madge, MacNeice, are modern through the character of their intellectual passion. We have been gradually approaching this art through that cult of sincerity, that refusal to multiply personality which is characteristic of our time. They may seem obscure, confused, because of their concentrated passion, their interest in associations hitherto untravelled; it is as though their words and rhythms remained gummed to one another instead of separating and falling into order. I can seldom find more than half a dozen lyrics that I like, yet in this moment of sympathy I prefer them to Eliot, to myself - I too have tried to be modern. They have pulled off the mask, the manner writers hitherto assumed, Shelley in relation to his dream, Byron, Henley, to their adventure, their action. Here stands not this or that man but man’s naked mind. [... .] MacNeice, the anti-communist, expecting some descent of barbarism next turn of the wheel, contemplates the modern world with even greater horror than the communist Day Lewis, although with less lyrical beauty. More often I cannot tell whether the poet is communist or anti-communist. On what side is Madge? Indeed I know of no school where the poets so closely resemble each other.’ (Cited in Jon Stallworthy, ‘Fathers and Sons’ [on McNeice with Mahon, Longley, and Muldoon], in Bullán: A Journal of Irish Studies, 2, 1, Summer 1995, p.5.)

Seamus Deane: ‘In fact, MacNeice’s poems like ‘Valediction’ and Section XVI of Autumn Journal ... are important as statements of a kind of rejection-in-acceptance of Ireland which is typical of the northern Protestant mind in one of its subtler manifestations.’ (IN Douglas Dunn, ed., Two Decades of Irish Writing, Carcanet 1975.)

Derek Mahon: ‘[H]e was apprehensive about the rise of Fascism, conventionally dubious about Communism, hostile to capitalism, and indifferent to formal religion - the very model, in fact, of a liberal intellectual’ (in Time Was Away, The World of Louis MacNeice, ed. Terence Brown & A. Reid, Dublin: Dolmen 1974).

Derek Mahon, Introduction, Sphere Book of Modern Irish Poetry (1972): ‘For a long time it seemeed that Louis MacNeice was Irish only by an accident of birth, but in recent years his reputation, never at the highest in Britain, has come to rest in the country he could never quite bring himself to disown. This is particularly the case in the North, wher his example has provided a frame of reference for a number of younger poets in much the same way as Kavanagh has done in the South.’ (p.14; quoted in Anthony Roche, ‘A Reading of Autumn Journal: The Question of Louis MacNeice’s Irishness’, in Text and Context, Autumn 1988, p.73.)

John Montague, ‘The Impact of International Modern Poetry on Irish Writing’, in Irish Poets in English: The Thomas Davis Lectures on Anglo-Irish Poetry, ed. Sean Lucy (Cork: Mercier Press 1972): ‘Louis MacNiece is the only Irish poet to form a natural part of the English literary scene; after Auden he was the most gifted poet of the Thirties. Their collaboration in Letters from Iceland is an example of poetry confronting the trouble of a period as they arise. The precedent of Byron a capital for both of them (MacNeice pays homage to him in “Cock of the North”) with his wide ranging, almost novelistic gift. But Byron was much more of a European phenomenon than MacNiece or even Auden, ever succeeded in being, and those who present him as a corrective example to more locally based Irish poets tend to forget this. So far as I know, Louis MacNeice has rarely been translated into another language, and even in America, his reputation has never been high. / I am not denying his sensibility, nor the obsession with transience and death which is his most moving central theme. I am just saying that his work is very much in the non-experimental tradition of English modern poetry, and, as such, nearly unexportable. Paradoxically though, the one aspect of his influence which seems to me particularly healthy is his diversity of landscape: the ease with which Northern poets, like Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, seem to move in the outside world may well derive from MacNeice's restless photographic eye. Few American poets, for instance, could equal his description of New York in “Refugees” where the skyscrapers: “… heave up in steel and concrete / Powerful but delicate as a swan's neck” [147] and the trains (it was before the destruction of Penn Station) leave “from stations haughty as cathedrals”.’ (pp.147-48.)  

William McKinnon: ‘MacNeice was not prepared to manufacture any belief, creed, or dogma that took him beyond the limits of his personal experience.’ (Apollo’s Blended Dream, 1971).

Peter McDonald, ‘“Ireland’s MacNeice”: A Caveat’, in Irish Review [Spring 1987], pp.64-69, investigates the displacement of Louis MacNeice and compares his style to the regionalism of John Hewitt and Seamus Heaney; further suggests that MacNeice’s lack of roots denied him principle convictions; includes 6 lines of “Carrick Revisited, 1945”, and quotes from Hewitt’s The Bitter Gourd (1945); frequently cites Lagan, Rann and The Irish Review [summary by Lisa Noone].

D. B. Moore: ‘MacNeice could find neither spiritual faith, political belief, or personal love and understanding to form the basis of his poetry, but relied instead on conflicts and indecision.’ (The Poetry of Louis MacNeice, Leicester, 1972, p.249).

Seamus Heaney [on MacNeice’s ‘bi-focal vision’]: ‘His ancestry in Mayo gave him a native dream place south of the border as well as a birthplace north of it, while his dwelling in England gave him a critical perspective on the peculiar Britishness of those roots in the north.’ (The Redress of Poetry, q.p.).

John F. Deane, ‘Louis MacNeice, growing up in a zealot faith which served only to lead men towards despair, also found despair in any form of humanism. …. MacNeice’s poetry charts his personal decline from faith into gnawing emptiness.’ (ed., Irish Poetry of Faith and Doubt, Introduction, Dublin: Wolfhound Press 1991, p.14.)

Michael Longley, ‘Poetry’, in Longley, ed., Causeway: The Arts in Ulster (Belfast: NI Arts Council 1971), pp.95-109, espec. pp.97-98: ‘Because he lived and worked for most of his life in England, it might be argued that Louis MacNeice does not really qualify as an Ulster poet. Apart from a few excuses which may appear too convenient - his Ulster voice and manner and their natural effect on the texture of his verse, and his frequent visits here - deeper considerations make him a touchstone of what an Ulster poet might be. MacNeice is still underestimated. Judgements would be more precise and just, I think, if the Northern Irish context were taken more into account. Many English critics are clearly not attuned to some of his qualities and procedures. He is too often billed as l’homme moyen sensual, a flashy juggler, slick and modish, a freewheeling epicurean, a poet too worldly to be really wise. The dizzy word play and the riot of imagery might well tempt a casual reader to suspect that MacNeice lacks depth and penetration, that he is really not much more than a professional entertainer. A proper consideration of his background, however, should help us to understand that all the gaudy paraphernalia of his poetry is finally a reply to darkness, to “the fear of becoming stone”. His games are funeral games: the bright patterns he conjures from the external world and the pleasures of being alive are not fairy light and bauble but searchlight and icon. And the seeds of darkness were sown during childhood. Ulster was a place hard with basalt and iron, cacophonous with “fog-horn, hill-horn, corncrake and church bell”, ‘“the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams”, “the voodoo of the Orange bands”, dark and oppressive with religion, “devout and profane and hard”. Narrow religion and life-denying puritanism mark the point at which Ulster’s darker attributes shade into the more personal aspects of MacNeice’s childhood. “Religion encroached upon us steadily”. He was afraid of his father’s “conspiracy with God”. The autobiographical writing indicates that he was terrorised by a precocious sense of sin and feelings of guilt which were connected with early encounters with death and mental illness: “When I was five the black dreams came;/Nothing after was quite the same.” (p.97.) [Discusses collections since 1951 up to The Burning Perch.] ‘These are strange poems: disenchantment is played off against powerful rhythms, a spare vocabulary against a wide range of subjects, a down-to-earth utterance against weird settings and atmospheres ... these are poems of the winter solstice. The nightmares of childhood have become the actual nightmares of old age and approaching death. [... &c.]’ (pp.98.)

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Terence Brown, ‘Louis MacNeice and the “Dark Conceit”’, in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 3, 4 (Oct. 1972): ‘[...] MacNeice’s interest in allegory had been long standing, while his own poetry in the ’forties and ’fifties exhibited an increasing symbolic and allegorical content.’ (p.16.) ‘Yet MacNeice, in areas where cultural concensus still exists, was perfectly capable of writing convincing traditional allegories. Some of the best of his late poems are of this kind.1 The discovery of Romantic love is a theme MacNeice treats allegorically with some success. “The Burnt Bridge” is an assured, economical and convincing allegory of a traditional kind. (p.22.) ‘MacNeice in his late poetry also demonstrates his ability to write convincing short semi-allegorical poems, when he organizes them round a central motif or ikon. These have the trenchancy and effectiveness of some of Herbert’s or Henryson’s short allegories. The effect of these poems is related to the fact that he uses traditional imagery and iconography deeply engrained even in our fragmented culture. [...] [23] MacNeice, when he died, was perfecting this kind of poem, and from a passage in Varieties of Parable we know that this was the realm he wished to continue to explore: What I myself would now like to write, if I could, would be doublelevel poetry, of the type of Wordsworth’s ‘Resolution and Independence’; and, secondly, more overt parable poems in a line of descent both from folk ballads such as “True Thomas” and some of George Herbert’s allegories in miniature such as ‘Redemption’. Sadly, we were robbed of these further experiments in the writing of allegory and near allegory, by MacNeice’s sudden death.’ (p.24 - end; for longer extracts, see attached.)

Terence Brown, ‘Louis MacNeice, An Anglo-Irish Quest’, [chap.,] in Northern Voices, Poets from Ulster (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1975), pp.98-113: ‘Caught, by the accidents of history, in a cultural no-man’s land, the young MacNeice felt himself socially isolated and cut off from the Catholic Irish and even more painfuly from Calvinist and Orangeman.’ (p.98-99.) ‘In the tense, sceptical, uneasy sensibility that MacNeice’s poems (particularly on Ireland) reveal, some of the basic insecurity of the Anglo-Irishman’s postion in Irish life is to be discerned’ (p.99.) ‘His characteristic syntax is controlled, elegantly careful, held in check. It is a syntax of conditional responses, markedly restrained by its use of parenthses and taut logic ...the poem proceeds through a taut, logical structure to prove conclusively that any such hope of the alleviation of life’s hazards is a mere delusion’ [ discussing “Icebergs”]. (p.105.) [Cont.]

Terence Brown (‘Louis MacNeice, An Anglo-Irish Quest’, 1975) - cont.: MacNeice’s poetry presents to us a ‘philosophically sceptical sensibility’ whose experience is of ‘metaphysical isolation, loneliness, and separation’ (p.106.) ‘it is becoming clear that the poems’ glittering surfaces, their facility of diction, general lightness of tone, and their pose of casual, liberal fairmindedness, have blinded too many to the fact that MacNeice is an intellectual poet.’ (p.108.) ‘He was to be, like Yeats, one of Ireland’s few distinctly metaphysical poets, yet, also like Yeats, one who could not do without imaginative nourishment which myth provides. Oxford and the metropolis formed his mind, but his imagination was involved with western landscapes.’ (p.113; End.) Bibliography incls. MacNeice, ‘When I Was Twenty-one’, in Saturday Book, ed. John Hadfield (London: Hutchinson 1961), pp.237-8; ‘Experiences with Images’, Orpheus II (1949), cp.126-131; ‘English Poetry Today’, The Listener, Vol. XL, No. 1,023 (2 Sept. 1948), 346; Introductory Note to The Dark Tower, 2nd edn., London, Faber & Faber, 1954, 21; Varieties of Parable (London: Cambridge UP), 1965); The Strings Are False (London: Faber & Faber 1965); also commentaries, Roy McFadden, ‘Review of Collected Poems by Louis MacNeice and The Edge of Being by Stephen Spender’, Rann, 7 (Winter 1949-50); Elizabeth Nicholson, ‘Trees Were Green’ in Time Was Away, ed. Terence Brown & Alec Reid (Dublin: Dolmen Press 1974); G. S. Fraser, Vision and Rhetoric (London: Faber & Faber 1959), pp.179-92 [identifies MacNeice’s characteristic stance as evasiveness, irony, wry watchfulness]; Brown, Louis MacNeice, Sceptical Vision (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1975); William T. McKinnon, Apollo’s Blended Dream (London: OUP 1971); Babette Deutsch, Poetry in Our Time (New York: Columbia UP 1956).

Terence Brown, Louis MacNeice: Sceptical Vision (Gill & Macmillan 1975): ‘Living in a painful no-man’s land between Ireland and England, suffering from the effects of the spiritual hyphenation [of an Anglo-Irish identity] ... exile from Ireland left him, finally, a stranger everywhere.’ (Sceptical Vision, pp.14-15; quoted in Anthony Roche, ‘A Reading of Autumn Journal: The Question of Louis MacNeice’s Irishness’, in Text and Context, Autumn 1988, pp.72-73.)

Terence Brown, ‘Louis MacNeice and the Poetry of Exile’, in 20th Century Studies, University of Kent: Scottish Acad. Press [q.d.]: ‘[U]seful light can be cast on the kind and value of his achievement if we consider him, not as an English poet but as an exile poet, distinct from Anglo-Irish poetic tradition.’ (p.78); ‘MacNiece’s exile was deeper than mere geographical displacement, an alienation form his place of birth ... Yet seeing him as an exile poet, not simply as an English one, can help to understand the nature of his achievement .. he was always an exile never an expatriate.’ (ibid., p.87).

Terence Brown, review of rep. edn. of The Strings are False, and John Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice, in Irish Review (Winter/Spring 1997), pp.146-49: ‘scrupulous, painstaking, senstive, yet finally unsatisfying’; Brown cites long passage in which verses from “The Sunlight in the Garden” (from The Earth Compels (1938), and remarks that the biographical reading in terms of a ‘constellation of associations’ connected with maternal and paternal caves and edifices diminishes the poem by excluding its erotic imagery of nets of gold, free lances, &c., in other places: ‘In concentrating how the poem is given emotional weight by a childhood in the past Stallworthy, in sense, misses the present’ (p.148); further attributes the emphasis on MacNeice’s radio work to the fact that it serves the ‘psychological orientation’ of the book better than the poetry, and suggests that Barbara Coulton’s book is adequate to the subject; ‘essentially a psychological study’, it ‘does not address with sufficient force the socio-cultural and political issues raised by the poet’s career and work. ... For it is the complex fate of being an Irishman of a certain kind in a period when issues of identity, loyalty, and belonging were pressed by particularly challenging circumstances, which, it can be argued, gives MacNeice’s poems their exciting tension as works of art, their sense of brilliant, but hard-won negotiations between conflicting feelings and attachments, as well as a childhood of trauma (which must obviously be factored into the difficult equation too.)’ in sum, ‘a biography which is more a gracefully thoughtful psychological profile than the comprehensive analytic work for which we had hoped.’ (p.149.)

Terence Brown, ‘Louis MacNeice’s Ireland’, in Tradition and Influence in Anglo-Irish Poetry, ed. Brown & Nicholas Grene (London: Macmillan 1989), pp.79-96: Brown remarks, ‘Yeats aided both Lewis and MacNeice to acknowledge the imaginative need they both possessed for mythic and metaphysical [89] possibilities. And it may not be fanciful to note that Beckett, their contemporary and fellow expatriate, in his later phase as an artist, when his work became ghost-possessed, turned to Yeats whose work he had largely earlier set aside.’ (Brown, op. cit., pp.89-90.); Further, ‘Ireland, subsequently is associated in the poet’s imagination with mystical possibilities, and not just in a superficial respect [... ; 91] it is a region of consciousness now linked in the poet’s mind with imagery of water and movement. [Quotes: ... will drown your logic fathoms deep’]. / However, in admitting the depths of human consciousness to his poetry, MacNeice courts the world of nightmare as that of an inspirational liberating mysticism. The dark shadows of that County Antrim rectory remain to haunt a mind ready to salute an Ireland that could now somehow represent psychological release and spiritual intimations. MacNeice’s later poetry frequently steps into the dimension of the black dream ...’ (Ibid., p.93.); draws attention to a pamphlet of 1932 by John Frederick MacNeice [father of the poet] in which the author says, ‘No man is to be more pitied than the man who has no country, or the man who is not sure what his country is.’ (p.21). Bibl., Terence Brown, ‘MacNeice: Father and Son’, in Brown and Alec Reid, eds., Time was Away: The World of Louis MacNeice, Dolmen 1974, pp.21-34. Terence Brown, ‘Out of Ulster 2: Heaney, Montague, Mahon and Longley, in Theo Dorgan, ed., Irish Poetry Since Kavanagh (Blackrock 196), pp.60-70; Terence, Brown, ‘MacNeice and the Puritan Tradition’, in Kathleen Devine and Alan J. Peacock, eds., Louis MacNeice and His Influence (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1997), pp.20-33.

Stan Smith (1982): ‘Perhaps scenting an antagonist, Smith disparages Northern Irish poetry “that looks back to the sceptical Protestant tradition of Louis MacNeice [and] takes up a worried, disapproving but finally uncomprehending stance towards an experience with which it feels no sense of affinity”.’ (Poetry in the Wars, p.11; quoted in Anthony Roche, ‘A Reading of Autumn Journal: The Question of Louis MacNeice’s Irishness’, in Text and Context, Autumn 1988, p.74.)

Tom Paulin, ‘The Man from No Part: Louis MacNeice’, in Ireland and the English Crisis, 1984, pp.75-84: ‘The urban rootless world of rootless urban clichés, consumer durables and advertising hoardings is an esential part of his imagination, and while he sometimes recycles images of the Irish landscape like a tourist board official eager to woo “the sentimental English”, few Irish writers have totally resisted the temptation to export their Irishness. And in any case Irishness is a sometimes clownish commodity which depends on being transported elsewhere.’ (p.76.) Bibl., ‘In the Salt Mines’ [on MacNeice’s drama], Ireland and the English Crisis, 1984, pp.80-84.

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Liam Harte, reviewing Jon Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice (1995), quotes ‘Day of Renewal’ [‘Where I was born, / Heckled by hooters and trams, lay black to the west / And I disowned it, played a ticklish game / Claiming a different birthplace, a wild nest / Further, more truly, west, on a bare height / Where nothing need be useful and the breakers / Came and came but never made any progress/And children were reborn each night.’; Harte gives first performance date of Persons from Porlock as BBC 30 Aug. 1963, central character Hank, a potholer; MacNeice cavilled when Anthony Blunt ‘denounced politics as beneath the attention of a civilised person. Most politics, yes, but not Irish politics. If I had one foot poised over untrodden asphodel, the other was still clamped to the ankle in the bogs’ (Strings are False, p.231); ‘Born in Ireland of Irish parents, I have never felt properly ‘at home’ in England, yet I can write here better than in Ireland. In America I feel rather more at home than in England (America has more of Ireland in it), but I am not sure how well I could work if I settled there permanently.’ (Selected Prose, p.88); saw Copelands lighthouse in Belfast Lough as ‘shooing us away from our country’ (ibid, p.66); ‘If you know what my whole self and my only self is, you know a lot more than I do. As far as I can make out, I not only have many different selves but I am often, as they say, not myself at all. Maybe it is just when I am not myself - when I am thrown out of gear by circumstances or emotion - that I feel like writing poetry’ (Poetry of W. B. Yeats, p.146); MacNeice’s epitaph for Dylan Thomas, ‘What we remember is not a literary figure to be classified in the text-book but something quite unclassifiable, a wind that bloweth where it listeth, a wind with a chuckle in its voice and news from the end of the world’ (quoted in Stallworthy, 1995, p.404.)

Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation (London: Jonathan Cape 1995): MacNeice ‘opted for neutrality calling down a plague on both houses in the internal struggle conflict in Northern Ireland’ (p.473; quoted in Stephen Osborne, PG Dip., UU 2011.)

Gerald Dawe, ‘Anatomist of Melancholia: Louis MacNeice’, in Against Piety: Essays in Irish Poetry (Belfast: Lagan Press 1995), pp.82-87:

MacNeice (quoted): ‘When we got home we would have tea in the nursery, strong tea thick with sugar, and sometimes before we went to bed, Miss Craig, for a treat, would give us thick beef sandwiches with mustard or a cold drink made of cream of tartar. Possibly our diet, though it was the cause, was one of the conditions of my dreams. These got worse and worse. Where earlier I had had dreams of being chased by mowing-machines or falling into machinery or arguing with tigers who wanted to eat me I now was tormented by something much less definte, much more serious ... a grey monotonous rhythm which drew me in towards a centre as if there were a sider at the centre drawing in his thread and everything else were unreal. (The Strings are False, q.p.; here p.82.) GD: ‘What haunts MacNeice’s poetry is what is strangely absent from The Strings are False - his willingness to find out what lies in the corner of his mind: the dormant, flawed and mysterious feelings that pervade his poems.’ (p.82). [On the Dublin literati:] ‘they hardly mentioned the war but debated the correct versions of Dublin street songs.’ (SAF, q.p.; here 83). ‘Man cannot live by courage, technique, imagination - alone. He has to have a sanction from outside himself. Otherwise his technical achievements, his empires of stocks and shares, his exploitation of power, his sexual conquests, all his apparent inroads on the world outside, are merely the self-assertion, the self-indulgence, of a limited self that whimpers behind the curtains, a spiritual masturbation.’ (ibid., q.p.; here p.85). ‘Man is essentially weak and he wants power; essentially lonely, he creates familiar daemons, Impossible Shes, and bonds - of race and creed - where no bonds are. He cannot lie by bread or Marx alone; he must always be after the Grail.’ (Ibid; here 86.)

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Neil Corcoran, ‘Keeping the Colours New: Louis MacNeice in the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland’, in Kathleen Devine & Alan Peacock, eds., Louis MacNeice and His Influence (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1997), pp.114-32. ‘[T]he revision of MacNeice’s standing and place is one of the clearest manifestations, a litmus test, of the present strength and authority of contemporary Northern Irish poetry and criticism.’ (p.115.) Further, ‘In generously promenading MacNeice contemporary Northern poets are - although certainly not in the conventionally melodramatic, oedipal, masculinist and capitalist Bloomian modes of struggle and swerve - registering attachment to a chosen precursor. The choice is individually self-interested as well as culturally propelled; and it is unsurprising to find MacNeice talking on different colours as he appears in the work of different poets. (p.115.)

Neil Corcoran, ‘Keeping the Colours New: Louis MacNeice in the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland’ (1997) - further: ‘When Heaney speaks of MacNeice “positioning his lever”, he is employing one of those many classroom metaphors which figure in both his poetry and his critical prose: here the lever remembers te physics lesson. These metaphors are compelling in their childlike immediacy and aura of nostalgia, but they are also sly in their authoritative, tutorial panache, as they measure, weight and balance. In his writing about MacNeice, Heaney has something of a field day [...]. But it is of course Seamus Heaney who has completed the figure, in a bravura act of new geometrical reappropriation, this attemp to “sketch the shape of an integrated literary tradition”. The act of writing Carrickfergus Castle into [119] the annals in this way, when Heaney began by excluding MacNeice in favour of Kavanagh, has involved painful reorientation and re-alignment on his part.’ (pp.119-20.)

Neil Corcoran, ‘Keeping the Colours New: Louis MacNeice in the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland’ (1997) - further: ‘It is of course to the point - although it is not a point Heaney makes - that the accommodating quincunx is a figure constructed exclusively from military architecture: towers, castles and keeps.’ (p.120.) Quotes MacNeice: ‘Yeats did not write primarily in order to influence men’s actions but he knew hat art can alter a man’s outlook and so indirectly affect his actions. He also recognised that art can, sometimes intentionally, more often perhaps unintentionally, precipitate violence. He was not sentimentalising when he wrote “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?’ (W. B. Yeats; end of penult. chap; here p.129.) Corcoran concludes: ‘The poem’s transformative ingenuity, which culminates with Louis clocking in at Harland and Wollf, offers MacNeice one of the most “unfamiliar affections” even Auden could have predicted of him; but the affection, drawing on a respect for what MacNeice managed to hand on in the way of usable potential, is wholly unwhimsical, the product not of fancy, but of fully engaged sympathetic imagination.’ (p.132.)

Alan Peacock, ‘Received Religion and Secular Vision: MacNeice and Kavanagh’, in Robert Welch, ed., Irish Writers and Religion [Irish Literary Studies, No. 37] (Colin Smythe 1992), pp.148-68: ‘Louis MacNeice was never a flag-bearer for any technical innovation in poetry; in his ideas he avoided extremes; and his subject-matter is often everyday, urban and based on observations and impressions which are not obviously outside the scope of anyone’s intelligent response to modern life.

Harry Clifton, ‘An Oeuvre Seen in Full Coherence’, review of Collected Poems, in The Irish Times (10 Feb. 2007), Weekend: ‘Louis MacNeice 1907-1963 ‘Have you seen Louis MacNeice’s poems?’ Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Marianne Moore in 1938. “That’s the kind of spotted, helter-skelter thing it seems so easy to fall into.” / MacNeice, all decade, had been writing his finest short poems and was about to peak creatively with Autumn Journal, a meditation on political ethics, personal life and Irish upbringing in the teeth of coming war that was to stand, with the writings of George Orwell and Primo Levi, as one of the key texts of liberal humanism, whose age we have lived through since 1945, and that many would say, since September 2001, has come to an end. [Quotes: “Sleep to the noise of running water ..., (&c.)”.] / So why the niggling disparagements, all along the line? Bishop, a decade later, repeated her comments to Robert Lowell, whom she clearly understood to be of the same opinion. Conrad Aiken put MacNeice down as a kind of travelling journalist in verse.’ (For full text, see RICORSO Library, “ ”, via index, or direct.)

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