One day, I dream, there will be books with titles like The MacNeice Generation, Thirties Poets—The MacNeice Group, MacNeice and After. To turn the tables is not to deny Auden's eminence—only his pre-eminence. Auden's role in English cultural history, supported then and now by the Auden groupies, distorts the aesthetic history of the 1930s, and the consequent course of poetry in the British Isles. Valentine Cunningham's recent magnum opus draws more on the relentlessly contemporary Spender than on MacNeice's longer-term vision; British Writers of the Thirties also tends to collapse literary modes into a single text or script. Thus “The Hebrides” illustrates ‘travel’ in a chapter headed ‘Seedy Margins’. Margins, yes. For those interested in poetic quality, Spender and Day Lewis have ceased to confuse the issue. But shrinking the quartet to a duet means rethinking, not ‘thirties poetry’ but poetry in the thirties. It means appreciating MacNeice and Auden for their complementary mediation between Yeats and Eliot (Owen, Thomas, Graves) on the one hand, and later poets on the other. MacNeice's mediation centred on relations between form and content, relations made irreversibly problematic for his generation. More persistently than Auden, he worried at the theories and practices he inherited. Until his death he went on accepting the challenges of the twentieth century to the lyric poem.

MacNeice's Irishness both enriched and complicated his inheritance as a poet. (His consciousness of literary genealogy is itself an Irish trait.) Whether you call him an Anglo-Irishman or an Ulster Protestant, he had his dark sides of the moon for some English and Southern Irish audiences. Cunningham misses the Irish contexts of the ‘hankering after Atlantis’ that led MacNeice to the Hebrides. But as ‘Irish poetry’, MacNeice's work was designed to appeal neither to English sentiment (‘Why do we like being Irish? Partly because / It gives us a hold on the sentimental English’) nor to native solidarity. Derek Mahon wrote in 1974:

Increasingly, [MacNeice's] view of Official Ireland (the Ireland of patriotic graft and pious baloney) was one of positive distaste, which is all right coming from Austin Clarke but bad manners from a Northern Protestant. There is a belief, prevalent since the time of Thomas Davis, that Irish poetry, to be Irish, must somehow express the National Aspirations; and MacNeice's failure to do so (the National Aspirations after all include patriotic graft and pious baloney) is one of the reasons for his final exclusion from the charmed circle, known and feared the world over, of Irish poets.

Not final. Mahon himself, Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin and others have seen to that. It is no accident that a younger set of poets from Northern Ireland, still living an uneasy cultural duality, should have homed to MacNeice's intonations, attitudes and techniques. MacNeice mediates between Irish and English poetry, as well as between generations. In this he follows Yeats: to MacNeice not only a modern master but an indigenous forebear (‘Like Yeats, I was brought up in an Irish middle-class Protestant family’). MacNeice at once accepted and contested his Yeatsian legacy, but in The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1941) he draws a firm formal circle around Yeats, Auden and himself:

We admired him too for his form. Eliot in 1921 had argued that, as the modern world is so complex, the poet must become ‘more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning’. A chaotic world, that is, could only be dealt with by the methods of The Waste Land. Yeats went back to an earlier tradition and suggested by his example that, given a chaotic world, the poet is entitled, if he wishes, to eliminate some of the chaos, to select and systematize. Treatment of form and subject here went hand in hand. Yeats's formalizing activity began when he thought about the world; as he thought it into a regular pattern, he naturally cast his verse in regular patterns also. A parallel process can be observed in W. H. Auden, in whose system something like Groddeck's ‘It’ takes the place of Yeats's Anima Mundi.

The importance of Yeats to Auden and MacNeice is not always perceived by English critics. Cunningham's index contains a five-line entry for Yeats, nearly a column for Eliot.

If Auden learned from Yeats's intellectual stylization, MacNeice absorbed a still more fundamental principle: his dramatic and symbolic ‘phantasmagoria’. MacNeice's methods have indeed appeared foreign in England: too glittering, too theatrical. His own metaphors have been turned against him. MacNeice, like Auden, has his empty moments of form without content. He admits that his early poetry was obsessed with ‘things dazzling, high-coloured, quick-moving, hedonistic or up-to-date’; but as a reaction against ‘fear, anxiety, loneliness … monotony’—which the poems also incorporate. Like Yeats's, MacNeice's poetry was founded on antithesis, dialectic, drama; and it began by nailing its rhetorical colours to the mast:

Shuttles of trains going north, going south drawing threads of blue,
The shining of the lines of trams like swords,
Thousands of posters asserting a monopoly of the good, the beautiful, the true,
Crowds of people all in the vocative, you and you,
The haze of the morning shot with words …

(“Morning Sun”)

MacNeice's internal rhyme, assonance, alliteration, refrain, syntactical figures, together with the intensity of his imagery, belong to an Anglo-Irish verbal theatre which recurrently attracts puritanical suspicion in England. Hence his empathy with Dublin's theatrical extremes: ‘The glamour of her squalor, / The bravado of her talk’. ‘Various and conflicting / Selves’ are the primum mobile of MacNeice's poetry, as they are not of Auden's. Autobiography is structural in Autumn Journal, occasional in “Letter to Lord Byron”. Spender (in The Thirties and After, 1978) got The Strings are False (MacNeice's prose autobiography) wrong for significantly English reasons: ‘His limitation (also his virtue) is the result of his excessively well trained mind and manneristic imagination which makes him rarely write the unexpected. There are no weeds, no ragged borders: flower beds planted from bright, gay, intelligent seeds out of labelled packets’. Could this be revenge for MacNeice's account of Spender in the book: ‘thinking of himself as the poet always, moving in his own limelight … already taking upon himself the travail of the world, undergoing a chronic couvade. Redeeming the world by introspection’. Spender's introspection and couvade are the obverse of phantasmagoria, instances of the solipsism pure and simple which Yeats attributed to some English Romantics: ‘the beryl stone was enchanted by our fathers that it might unfold the pictures in its own heart, and not to mirror our own excited faces’. It is amusing that MacNeice, writing about Yeats's Autobiographies, should recognize (but understand) what Spender recognized in his own self-dramatization:

The same passion for neatness that produced A Vision produces in his own autobiographical writings a world that is too good to be true, a cartoon world drawn in a few hard, black lines. Both his rhetoric and more unexpectedly, his use of anecdote contribute to this. He tells you one story or quotes one remark from Mr A. and that fixes Mr A. in the pattern; the rest of him is discounted. At all costs Yeats avoided flux, the sphere of the realist proper.

The MacNeice generation could not afford to avoid flux (Graves paid a price for doing so), and MacNeice's quarrels with Yeatsian form arise from this necessity. His revaluations of ‘vulgarity’ and ‘impurity’ make the best of the poet's new obligation to ‘mention things’, as Modern Poetry (1938) puts it. In comparison with the selectivities of Yeats's imagery and diction MacNeice's poetry reads like a mail-order catalogue for life:

                    Let the saxophones and the xylophones
And the cult of every technical excellence, the miles of canvas in the galleries
And the canvas of the rich man's yacht snapping and tacking on the seas
And the perfection of a grilled steak—

Eliot had mentioned steaks and popular music, but with an awful daring, as MacNeice noted: ‘The vulgarity in Eliot is always carefully put in its place as vulgarity’. Similarly, whereas Yeats's master-diagram of the gyres accounts for all flux within pattern; MacNeice allows for the possibility that the kaleidoscope may not settle into shape, or alternatively that closure may deaden: ‘We jump from picture to picture and cannot follow / The living curve that is breathlessly the same’. Some of MacNeice's early poems explore this aesthetic Catch-22. In ‘Poussin’ the flow of perception itself rescues an art-object from the stasis MacNeice dreaded in life and art:

In that Poussin the clouds are like golden tea,
And underneath the limbs flow rhythmically,
The cupid's blue feathers beat musically,
And we dally and dip our spoon in the golden tea.
The tea flows down the steps and up again,
An old-world fountain, pouring from sculptured lips,
And the chilly marble drop like sugar slips
And is lost in the dark gold depths, and the refrain
Of tea-leaves floats about and in and out,
And the motion is still as when one walks and the moon
Walks parallel but relations remain the same.
And thus we never reach the dregs of the cup,
Though we drink it up and drink it up and drink it up,
And thus we dally and dip our spoon.

This also emphasises the special ability of poetry to follow ‘the living curve’. ‘Rhythmically’, ‘musically’ and ‘refrain’ apply to the perpetual motion of the sonnet itself: ‘we drink it up and drink it up and drink it up’.

MacNeice's essay “Poetry Today” (1935) sums up the problem of flux and pattern as he then saw it:

There is material for poetry everywhere; the poet's business is not to find it but to limit it. Part of his job is forgetting. We want to have the discoveries of other poets in our blood but not necessarily in our minds. We want just enough a priori to make us ruthless so that when we meet the inrush of a posteriori (commonly called ‘life’) we can sweep away the vastly greater part of it and let the rest body out our potential pattern; by the time this is done, it will be not only a new but the first pattern of its kind and not particularly ours; the paradox of the individual and the impersonal.

His ‘journalistic’ poems are the clearest case in point. “Birmingham” accommodates a great inrush of a posteriori:

Splayed outwards through the suburbs houses, houses for rest
Seducingly rigged by the builder, half-timbered houses with lips pressed
So tightly and eyes staring at the traffic through bleary haws
And only a six-inch grip of the racing earth in their concrete claws;
In these houses men as in a dream pursue the Platonic Forms
With wireless and cairn terriers and gadgets approximating to the fickle norms
And endeavour to find God and score one over the neighbour
By climbing tentatively upward on jerry-built beauty and sweated labour.

Cunningham points out that “Birmingham” and “Belfast” are in fact ‘relatively rare in their dedicated urban interests’. But “Birmingham” is remarkable not only for sensuously inhabiting the city, but for combining an urban microcosm, a social critique, and a symbolic overview. All the poem's data converge on ‘Vulcan's forges’, on the ‘black pipes of organs in the frayed and fading zone’. “Birmingham” is ‘the first pattern of its kind’ because MacNeice has given the inrush its metaphorical and rhythmic head. The double medium of eight-line stanza (hardly Yeats's) and massively irregular couplet suggests a poet who is remaking form. Inter alia the C. K. Williams of his day, MacNeice lets some of his patterns take a bulkier shape from sentence-constructions, as well as details, which belong to the sphere of realist prose.

Auden's poetry retained more of Yeats's stanzaic system, as he did of his intellectual system—both sometimes becoming formulaic. MacNeice in responding to flux ‘On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palm of one's hands’ re-textured form from the inside out. Thus Auden's sonnets and couplets roll off a production-line while MacNeice's are ‘rhythmically’, ‘musically’ distinctive. The orthodox couplets of his Audenesque “Letter to Graham and Anna” cannot compare with the truly heroic ones of “Birmingham”. MacNeice never really favoured free verse: ‘Some traditional verse forms are like ladders with rungs every few inches; you get stuck in them or stub your toes on them. But a ladder without any rungs … ?’ However, in a sense he mediated too between free verse and traditional forms—thereby strengthening the latter. Autumn Journal, capitalizing on the experimentation of his eclogues, amalgamates rhyme and irregular lines. It heals the Modernist breach in other ways too. In “Eclogue for Christmas”, halfway between The Waste Land and something else, MacNeice had criticised the abstract tendencies of Modernist forms:

I who was Harlequin in the childhood of the century,
Posed by Picasso beside an endless opaque sea,
Have seen myself sifted and splintered in broken facets,
Tentative pencillings, endless liabilities, no assets,
Abstractions scalpelled with a palette-knife
Without reference to this particular life.

This seeks ‘unity of being’ and social unities in preference to the fragmented universe presented by some Modernist art. Eliot's poetry also cuts people into bits, as MacNeice observed: ‘The “short square fingers stuffing pipes” were not brute romantic objects abstracted into a picture by Picasso, but were living fingers attached to concrete people’. Thus Autumn Journal might be called ‘Beyond The Waste Land’. It fulfils the implicit agenda of “Eclogue for Christmas” by facing chaos with a toughened humanism, a discursive brio, and a verse-medium that swings between closure and openness. MacNeice's ‘formalizing activity’ in the poem copes with his most powerful inrush yet. And it does more than project what he termed ‘Generalisations balanced by pictures’. The form of Autumn Journal gets to the root of relations between a priori and a posteriori, flux and pattern, history and poetry:

And when I should remember the paragons of Hellas
          I think instead
Of the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists,
          The careless athletes and the fancy boys,
The hair-splitters, the pedants, the hard-boiled sceptics
          And the Agora and the noise
Of the demagogues and the quacks; and the women pouring
          Libations over graves
And the trimmers at Delphi and the dummies at Sparta and lastly
          I think of the slaves.

In MacNeice's aesthetic, sounds and rhythm prevail over the ultimate cadence of line and stanza, as flux prevails over stasis. Autumn Journal's momentum multiplies the kind of impulsion that he relished in internal rhyme and refrain. Thematically, too, sound and movement are central: the noise and traffic of Athens or Birmingham, all those hoots, clangs and clinks punctuating the flux, all the poems in which vehicles and time go fast or slow. Juvenilia like “River in Spate” and “Genesis” (‘The crisp chip of chisels and the murmuring of saws’) suggest an obsession with words for sounds and the sounds of words. In MacNeice's later ‘parable poetry’ syntax assumes overall control of his sound-system:

The conductor's hands were black with money:
Hold on to your ticket, he said, the inspector's
Mind is black with suspicion, and hold on to
That dissolving map. We moved through London,
We could see the pigeons through the glass but failed
To hear their rumours of wars, we could see
The lost dog barking but never knew
That his bark was as shrill as a cock crowing,
We just jogged on, at each request
Stop there was a crowd of aggressively vacant
Faces, we just jogged on, eternity
Gave itself airs in revolving lights …

If Autumn Journal consummates MacNeice's handling of the complex period in verse—‘And lastly I think of the slaves’ is a wonderfully calculated climax—Solstices and The Burning Perch stretch syntax as it has never been stretched before in poetry. Poems like “All Over Again”, “Variation on Heraclitus”, “Reflections” and “Hold-up” take different syntactical possibilities to disturbing and exhilarating extremes. “Variation on Heraclitus”, ironically mimicking pattern in pursuit of flux, changes the formal rules to prove that ‘none of your slide snide rules can catch what is sliding so fast’. In the early stages of “Charon” asyndeton reinforces the dislocation of consciousness: ‘We moved … We could see … We just jogged on’. Jolting enjambement (‘vacant / Faces’) helps to give syntax primacy in shaping the movement. Thus ‘Faces, we just jogged on, eternity’ has no autonomy as a line. Refrain, again basically syntactical, also reaches a structural culmination. Sometimes stabilizing, sometimes destabilizing, refrain has always been at the heart of MacNeice's flux, a rung on his formal ladder. In “Charon” it dismayingly stabilizes the pattern of the poem according to iron patterns elsewhere.

In his last poems MacNeice had finally exorcised the ‘journalistic’ dimension that no longer worked for him or for the time. “Charon”, while again conveying the traffic of the city and of history, evidently deviates from ‘the sphere of the realist proper’. The poem strips former modes to a skeletal ‘bony feature’. (The lost dog and the cock are vestigial echoes of Autumn Journal.) MacNeice's concern with mortality and society has found a new concentrated means of expression. But his parables were made possible by his panoramas, his exclusions by all he had included, tight form by capacious form. More than Auden's, MacNeice's career exemplifies what the 1930s introduced into poetry, what could later be discarded, what permanently revolutionized the practice of good poets.

Take three poets: Philip Larkin, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon. Larkin's obituary for MacNeice interestingly presents him as an underground ‘poet's poet’. We might have expected Larkin to acknowledge debts to the formal accommodation of posters, trains and shops; but he also acknowledges another inspiration and affinity:

When we were young, the poems of Louis MacNeice were not recommended to us in the same breath as those of Eliot and Auden. Perhaps for this reason the secret taste we formed for them was all the stronger. He was … a town observer: his poetry was the poetry of our everyday life, of shop-windows, traffic policemen, ice-cream soda, lawnmowers, and an uneasy awareness of what the newsboys were shouting. We were grateful to him for having found a place in poetry for these properties …

Now we are older some of these qualities have faded, some seem more durable. Against the sombre debits of maturity that his later poetry so frequently explores—the neurosis, the crucifying memory, the chance irrevocably lost—he set an increased understanding of human suffering just as against the darkening political skies of the late Thirties he had set the brilliantly quotidian reportage of Autumn Journal.

Given that obituaries tend to be polite, this might be contrasted with Larkin's view of the later Auden in ‘What's Become of Wystan?’ Derek Mahon also seized on the quotidian and the neurotic in MacNeice, though with an extra recognition of their origins:

Walking among my own this windy morning
In a tide of sunlight between shower and shower,
I resume my old conspiracy with the wet
Stone and the unwieldy images of the squinting heart.
Once more, as before, I remember not to forget.

(‘In Belfast’)

Poems by MacNeice and Mahon share neuroses culturally specific to ‘darkest Ulster’. Their scenarios never take for granted an English ‘ordered open air long ruled by dyke and fence’ which MacNeice's “Woods” perceives as foreign. Vice versa, his foreign gaze produces a hectically uneasy Birmingham. Mahon also shares MacNeice's form to a greater extent. This is not only a matter of ‘a familiar voice whispering in my ear’. Whereas Larkin formally doubles back from MacNeice to Yeats, Mahon concentrates MacNeice's rhythmical discoveries into a more streamlined stanzaic framework, just as he condenses his urban data. The formal difference between “Prayer before Birth” and Mahon's ‘An Unborn Child’, which it inspired, typifies other differences. ‘In Carrowdore Churchyard’, his elegy for MacNeice, suggests how Mahon's stanzas owe some of their momentum to being encoded with MacNeicean flux, with his seasonal and diurnal symbolism:

Your ashes will not stir, even on this high ground,
However the wind tugs, the headstones shake.
This plot is consecrated, for your sake,
To what lies in the future tense. You lie
Past tension now, and spring is coming round
Igniting flowers on the peninsula.

Mahon also follows MacNeice in making the revitalized cliché a creative mainspring—the flux of conversation. Paul Muldoon further revitalizes the revitalized cliché, while his different brand of parable poetry has comprehended MacNeice's later structures. A poet's stature should be measured by the variousness of his successors—as academics by citations. Muldoon placed MacNeice (together with Patrick Kavanagh) at the head of his Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry. That corrects an imbalance on one side of the Irish sea. English anthologists, please copy.