In an uncollected poem of 1995, ‘MacNeice's London’, Derek Mahon imagines Louis MacNeice in wartime, in ‘A bunker of civilised sound, / A BBC studio’:

                                                                      Thirty years dead
I see your ghost, as the Blitz carooms overhead,
Dissolve into a smoke-ring, meditative,
Classic, outside time and space,
Alone with itself, in the presence of the nations,
Well-bred, dry, the voice
Of London, speaking of lost illusions.(1)

These lines capture, in a brilliant miniature, much of the complexity of Louis MacNeice's cultural and historical situations. While the adjectives here—‘meditative’, ‘classic’, ‘alone’, ‘well-bred’, ‘dry’—seem to map out the distinctive qualities of the poet's voice, that voice is also working as ‘the voice / Of London’ while it speaks from the wartime BBC to the world. Mahon's final line-break allows the reader to sense the distance between the intimacy and solitude of the poet and the prepared voice of the public writer: as ‘the voice’ turns into ‘the voice / Of London’, we feel a mild and complicating shock of something ‘outside time and space’ that suddenly locates itself in a specific moment and situation.

The resonance of a number of ironies is being relished in Mahon's lines, not least that of ‘the voice / Of London’ being spoken by an Irish poet. Of course, Louis MacNeice was an Irish poet, and thought of himself as being an Irish poet, from the beginning to the end of his writing career. Any doubts, quibbles, or equivocations on that point are not MacNeice's, and they can find little ground in the facts of his life and his writing. MacNeice was also a poet who worked and wrote for much of his career in England, and whose writing often dwells on the England of his time, sometimes in extraordinary and illuminating detail. The man who, as a broadcaster in wartime and afterwards, was indeed in some senses ‘the voice / Of London’ had already brought the London of the year before the war to life, in his long poem Autumn Journal (1939), with a brilliance and intensity unmatched even in his own gifted generation of British writers. Later, MacNeice continued to work largely from London as a broadcaster—a radio producer who was also the prolific author of radio plays and other features—until his death in 1963.

So, it is true that the poetic ‘voice’ of MacNeice is bound, in some respects, to be one whose most personal turns are complemented by the awareness of more public situations. If we look at his work as a whole (and it is a large body of work for someone who died just short of 56 years of age: thirteen volumes of poetry, three critical books, a volume of autobiography, over 120 scripts for radio, and enough critical and journalistic writing to fill two volumes in selection alone) we are presented with a number of seeming contradictions. Here is, for example, a writer whose own early life provides him with a series of recurring and compelling images that may suggest a lifelong preoccupation with the self, while his subject matter is also—and often in the same poems—the history of his own time or generation, or the history of times remote from his own. Here, too, is a poet who appears to embrace an aesthetic of inclusive observation of the world, often in seemingly journalistic turns of phrase and takes of detail, while remaining committed to an idea of poetry as parable-like, and mythic, in its essential bearing. MacNeice is a poet given to classical allusion and generic resource; he is, also, a poet whose language and diction are both contemporary and unaffected, and whose range of reference embraces popular as much as high culture. MacNeice is Irish, but capable of angry denunciation of the Ireland of his time; he works as a broadcaster in wartime and post-war Britain, but is scornful of ‘propaganda’ in mass-communication, and celebrates idiosyncrasy and independence. Like any Irish poet of the twentieth century, he feels himself in W. B. Yeats's shadow; but where Yeats's imagination is proudly aristocratic in its affiliations, MacNeice's is determinedly democratic. All these things contribute to what we might mean by MacNeice's ‘voice’ as a poet, and are subsumed in a more general distinction between ‘irony’ in that voice—the knowing, sometimes sceptical, haunted and understating qualities in MacNeice's way of writing—and the voice's ‘responsibility’, its relation to the seriousness of what it means. The ‘lost illusions’ mentioned in Derek Mahon's poem are both personal and public: that is to say, they are both MacNeice's and our own.

MACNEICE'S LIFE

Born in Belfast, Louis MacNeice in fact grew up in a seaside town to the north of that city, in Carrickfergus, where his father was rector of the Anglican church. The youngest of three children (one of whom suffered from Downs Syndrome), MacNeice lost his mother at the age of five, and was educated at schools in England, returning for holidays at Carrickfergus, and with his family on trips to the West of Ireland. MacNeice left Marlborough School in 1926 to become a student at Oxford, where he studied Greek, Latin and Philosophy. While there, MacNeice met a number of lifelong friends, most notably the young Auden, who was already hard at work as a rising poet, and it was in these years as an undergraduate (1926-30) that MacNeice came to realise that his own ambitions were primarily literary ones: he precociously published a volume of poems (most of which he later dropped from his oeuvre) entitled Blind Fireworks in 1929, and was already seen as a member of a circle of young writers likely to come to prominence in the 1930s.

Towards the end of his time at Oxford, MacNeice met and fell in love with Marie Ezra, and the two were married (after overcoming parental objections from both sides) just as MacNeice completed his final exams. As a married man, MacNeice needed a career; and he was unusual amongst his contemporaries in going straight from university into a lecturing post, in the Department of Classics at Birmingham University. It was at Birmingham that MacNeice came under the influence of E. R. Dodds, an Ulster-born Professor of Classics there, who had taken the considerable risk of offering a post to a young man still waiting to graduate. Over the coming years, when he worked with and lived close to Dodds, MacNeice began to write the poems that would bring him to attention in the 1930s, as well as learning much about a social context quite distinct from either the rectory-centred world of his youth or the rarefied and over-aesthetic atmosphere of late 1920s Oxford. It was at Birmingham in the early 1930s that MacNeice grew up—and grew up into a political climate of crisis and foreboding that was to intensify over the course of that decade. In domestic terms, however, life was idyllic to almost a stifling degree: so, at any rate, MacNeice remembers these years in The Strings Are False, the autobiographical work written (but not published) in 1940/1. Not long after the birth of a son, Dan, in 1934, the idyll came to a sudden end with Marie's decision to leave her husband and child, and go to the USA with an American student and football-player. In the complicated and sometimes chaotic emotional fallout from this, MacNeice left Birmingham to live in London, where he took up another post in Classics at Bedford College.

By 1936, when MacNeice and his young son arrived in London, the literary world was dominated by members of the so-called ‘Auden group’, including poets like Cecil Day-Lewis and Stephen Spender. MacNeice, whose first mature volume, Poems, had been published by the prestigious house of Faber and Faber in 1935 to warm reviews, moved immediately to the centre of the metropolitan literary scene. By now, it was clear to MacNeice himself that his heart did not lie in the necessarily dry expanses of classical scholarship; partly for this reason, the late 1930s were years of furious literary productivity as MacNeice began writing a great deal of journalism and other commercial material, along with his increasingly assured and original poetry: two plays were produced in London by Rupert Doone's fashionable Group Theatre; there were books on the Hebrides, and on zoos, as well as a book on modern poetry, and trips to Spain before and during the Civil War, in addition to the trip to Iceland in company with Auden, which resulted in Letters From Iceland (1937). With the publication of his Faber volumes of poetry The Earth Compels (1937) and Autumn Journal (1939), MacNeice was widely regarded as among the foremost young British poets.

On the outbreak of the Second World War, however, MacNeice was on his way to the USA, having given up his lecturing job in London for a temporary post in the English Department of Cornell University. The reasons for this decision were as much personal as professional, for MacNeice had fallen in love with the American writer Eleanor Clarke, and hoped to use his time in New York State to put their relationship on to a firmer footing. With Europe at war, MacNeice was, like other British exiles (including Auden and Christopher Isherwood), seen by some as having deserted his country; he defended his position, and that of the other expatriates, but by 1940, with the so-called ‘Phoney’ war at an end, he was beginning to feel anxious that he was indeed missing out on an experience which he might have some responsibility as a writer to encounter. Decisively, perhaps, the relationship with Eleanor Clarke did not prosper. At the end of 1940, MacNeice made the dangerous crossing of the Atlantic to return to England, where (having been turned down on health grounds for service in the Royal Navy) he began to work as a scriptwriter (and subsequently a producer) for the BBC, covering London's experience of the Blitz, and learning the trade of radio-playwright—a form of drama he found much more satisfying than his pre-war ventures into writing for the stage. It was in London during the war that MacNeice married Hedli Anderson, a singer who had worked with Benjamin Britten and the Group Theatre.

In many ways, MacNeice later regarded London in the hectic (and often dangerous) years of the war as the scene of the most creatively and humanly intense period in his life. Certainly, he was not immune to a general feeling of anti-climax, and some degree of political disillusion, in the immediate post-war years. Experiencing the war from London had, for a time at least, sharpened MacNeice's feelings of scepticism about Ireland and its relation to the modern world. On unpaid leave in the West of Ireland in 1945, he wrote his best work for radio, the grim and powerful play The Dark Tower, which makes a compelling parable out of the struggle between history's weight and the individual's need for independence, along with a series of poems about the West of Ireland that complement and answer his immediately pre-war sequence, also set there, “The Closing Album”. Although the wartime poem “Neutrality”, which condemns Eire's isolation from the European conflict, is an emphatic and pained statement by MacNeice, it tells much less than the whole story about the poet's complicated feelings; especially after his father's death in 1942, MacNeice found himself thinking more frequently about Ireland, and continued to visit the country and his friends and literary colleagues there.

Through the 1940s and 1950s MacNeice lived the life of a busy writer and broadcaster, working steadily on radio plays and features, literary journalism and, of course, more volumes of poetry. In these years, MacNeice's critical stock began to decline somewhat, despite the regular publication of new collections; in this respect, he shared in the fate of his other ‘1930s poet’ contemporaries, like Auden and Spender, whose work was by then more often politely respected than eagerly anticipated. After publishing his Collected Poems in 1949, MacNeice moved on to experiments in longer poems, often deriving from his experience of broadcasting, which produced Ten Burnt Offerings in 1952 and Autumn Sequel, a huge poem written in terza rima, in 1954. Neither volume was a success, and by the mid-1950s it seemed that the poet had written himself into a corner, producing long, over-elaborated and sometimes dull pieces that paled beside his earlier work. In 1957, with the publication of Visitations, MacNeice returned to shorter poems, and with a new sense of energy, which provided the lyric momentum for the two subsequent collections that were in fact to contain much of his finest poetry, Solstices (1961) and The Burning Perch (1963).

MacNeice's last years were as productive as any other phase of his career, and they saw the development of a new style and tone in his writing, in which his poetic voice gained a new, and sometimes startling, resonance and originality. Although the last two volumes seem inevitably like ‘late’ poetry, it is easy to forget that these last poems were in fact written by a man in his fifties: MacNeice's death in 1963, which resulted from the pneumonia following a drenching trip to Yorkshire in search of accurate sound-effects for a play about potholing, was cruelly early, in terms of literature as well as life. It is clear now (though it might not have seemed quite so clear to the poet himself) that, in the early 1960s, MacNeice had begun a new phase of his writing career, and had left behind the sometimes lacklustre work of the previous decade. Had MacNeice lived to be seventy, we would now almost certainly think of him as a senior contemporary of Heaney, Mahon, Longley and Muldoon; and how the poems he did not live to write would have absorbed the events of post-1968 Northern Ireland is one of those futile, but irresistible, speculations to which the early deaths of poets inevitably draw their readers.

RESPONSIBILITIES

MacNeice came to maturity in a decade (the 1930s) when literature was often thought to stand in a direct relation to events, both as a clear record and as a part of the intellectual conduct of society. Famously, his contemporary W. H. Auden moved, in the space of that decade, from the assertion that art's job was to ‘Make action urgent and its nature clear’ to the concession that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’.² MacNeice's views took no such dramatic swerves; but he was more consistent than Auden in his belief that literature stood in some kind of accountable relation to the common life of its time. Issues like these look, at first sight, political; but they are in fact matters of aesthetic decision and commitment, and it is in this respect that MacNeice's work has its distinctive originality and durability.

As a twentieth-century poet, and the more so as an Irish poet, MacNeice was indebted in profound ways to the example of Yeats; additionally, and just as inevitably, he engaged with Modernism as a poetic tendency. In a way, MacNeice negotiates the influences of Yeats and T. S. Eliot, but he does this less in terms of ideas or positions than of matters of writing: the register, genres and techniques of poetry; the long poem and the lyric; the personal and the impersonal voice, and the resonance of complexes of images and sounds. In MacNeice's work, we encounter an enormously wide variety of verse-forms, inherited and invented, and this technical resource is in the cause of something other than just a display of virtuosity. In particular, the poetry of MacNeice's last years seems to work its way into new and subtle mutations of lyric forms and rhythms, escaping what MacNeice called ‘the “iambic” groove’ of English metrical instinct.³ All this mastery of form, however, works for a purpose in MacNeice, and is intended at least as a means of speaking clearly, rather than in any code, private or public, of aesthetic exclusiveness.

In 1938, around the time of composing Autumn Journal, MacNeice wrote of how ‘The poet is once again to make his response as a whole’, ‘reacting with both intelligence and emotion … to experiences’.⁴ There is a characteristic flatness about this, but it is also a manifesto which the poetry makes good, and continues to make good in the succeeding decades. It is true that MacNeice's public voice is at its most effective when least self-conscious; some of the longer pieces in the later 1940s and the 1950s are both laboured and lacking in colour, while the poet's commitment to some virtues, especially those of plain-speaking and defence of liberal democracy, led to instances of bathos and dullness in work like Autumn Sequel. However, this voice was also capable of penetrating clarity, concision and originality, most of all perhaps in the compressed, haunting and haunted poems of MacNeice's last years.

In “Budgie” (from the posthumously-published The Burning Perch), a caged bird becomes the symbol for both the poet regarding, along with his readers, a threatened and disintegrating world (one in more grave danger by the early 1960s even than it had been in the 1930s), and for the self-regard of the habitually preening artiste (which all true artists, however talented, are in danger of becoming). The result is an extraordinary transformation of Yeats's singing bird from the ‘Byzantium’ poems:

Budgie, can you see me? The radio telescope
Picks up a quite different signal, the human
Race recedes and dwindles, the giant
Reptiles cackle in their graves, the mountain
Gorillas exchange their final messages,
But the budgerigar was not born for nothing,
He stands at his post on the burning perch—
I twitter Am—and peeps like a television
Actor admiring himself in the monitor.(5)

MacNeice's imaginative daring is matched, in lines like these, with an extraordinary technical control of phrase and timing. This control itself depends on our sense of the writing as being in an original relation to straightforward speaking—to what MacNeice in the 1930s would have called ‘communication’—without existing in a hermeneutic, essentially closed and private, world of its own verbal procedures. In this sense, these lines do indeed negotiate the influences of Yeats and Eliot, producing something that is both its own memorable creation, and in compelling relation to the world in which it is written and read.

MacNeice's sense of poetry's responsibilities included, of course, his feeling for influence. A short poem from the mid-1950s is addressed “To Posterity”:

When the books have all seized up like the books in graveyards
And reading and even speaking have been replaced
By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you
Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste
They held for us for whom they were framed in words,
And will your grass be green, your sky be blue,
Or will your birds be always wingless birds?

The vistas that open here are relevant to MacNeice's large sense of what a poetic voice must be in its ‘public’ aspect. We might notice that the ambitions of the 1930s for direct communication have been tempered, and that the future has become a worryingly unreadable kind of open book. But the poem takes us, nevertheless, to the heart of the matter for MacNeice: words themselves need to live, and life for the poet is always a life of words, and in words. he is responsible for the future, in this sense at least, and the integrity of language is not separable from other kinds of integrity. If this is the lesson of much of MacNeice's best writing that speaks in a ‘public’ voice, it is also the rule by which his more apparently ‘personal’ material has to work. In the process, the poetry provides an example of ‘a living language’ that can exercise the posterity represented by subsequent poets: in Northern Irish poetry alone, the work of Mahon, Longley and Paul Muldoon has responded at deep levels to MacNeice's artistic example and impetus. “To Posterity” is an artistic manifesto so tight-lipped that its ambition might be missed at first glance; but it is no less serious, and no less consequential for that.

VOICE AND IRONY

From almost the beginning, MacNeice's poetic voice struck readers as a distinctive one. In defining this special quality, we need to engage with the quality of stylistic suppleness and acuteness which makes itself felt in that voice, and which it is tempting to characterise as ‘ironic’. Of course, irony is a term with a long critical history, but we should remember that it is also a word that tends to carry other than strictly literary-critical connotations in many contexts. To regard the world ironically is, after all, often taken to mean something slightly distinct from taking the world seriously. This shows through when we check dictionary definitions: ‘A figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used’ (OED 1.a); ‘A condition of affairs or events of a character opposite to what was, or might naturally be, expected; a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things’ (OED 2). Clearly, this does not fit the voice we hear in MacNeice's poetry, as here in the opening lines of “Now that the shapes of mist”, from 1936:

Now that the shapes of mist like hooded beggar-children
Slink quietly along the middle of the road
And the lamps draw trails of milk in ponds of lustrous lead
I am decidedly pleased not to be dead.

The fourth line seems on first reading to be striking an attitude, affectedly perhaps: ‘decidedly’ is the kind of intensifier not usually to be met with in a serious context for being pleased with something—you might be decidedly pleased to have received a birthday present, for instance, but hardly (say) to have survived a major operation. Given this, the formulation ‘decidedly pleased not to be dead’ starts to look very odd indeed, since its apparent insouciance would sit more comfortably with the pleasure normally expressed as being alive. But MacNeice does not say he is glad to be alive; he tells us he is pleased not to be dead. Considering this degree of strangeness in expression, is ‘decidedly pleased’ an ‘ironic’ turn of phrase?

In fact, the poetry here makes sure that we do not decide such questions in terms of isolated phrases, since MacNeice's line works as one part of a larger rhythmic, rhyming structure. We hear ‘I am decidedly pleased not to be dead’ immediately after the long line with which it rhymes, ‘And the lamps draw trails of milk in ponds of lustrous lead’, and so its brevity is felt as a kind of snapping-tight of the stanza, as the long vowels and crowded stresses of one line (‘lamps draw trails’, ‘ponds of lustrous lead’) speed up into rhythms of clipped conversation (‘pleased not to be dead’). The ‘irony’, then, is something working to make us aware of form, an acknowledgement of the way a poem shapes and controls the order and sound of what it has to say. The whole of this first stanza is concerned with perceiving visual shapes, and the ‘beggar-children’ of the first line, who so much dominate the stanza, are in fact twice-removed from direct presence there: once, in their being ‘hooded’, and twice in their being in fact a simile for the ‘shapes of mist’.

The remainder of MacNeice's poem continues to make the most of instabilities, as it becomes clearer that the road is being seen from a car, and that the mist is part of a threatening night's weather. The poet braves this, and braves too the possibilities of bathos or infelicity in the final line of his second stanza:

Or when wet roads at night reflect the clutching
Importunate fingers of trees and windy shadows
Lunge and flounce on the windscreen as I drive
I am glad of the accident of being alive.

Avoiding an accident on the road, the poet celebrates the ‘accident of being alive’, bouncing his language in a way that reinforces the subtlety of ‘decidedly pleased not to be dead’. Those ‘beggar children’ are still present in ‘clutching / Importunate fingers’, and the distance between them and the figure of the driving poet is one between death and life: the poet lives at their expense. As the poem ends, we learn more about this ironic distance, and learn in the process about the self-awareness this involves:

There are so many nights with stars or closely
Interleaved with battleship-grey or plum,
So many visitors whose Buddha-like palms are pressed
Against the windowpanes where people take their rest.
Whose favour now is yours to screen your sleep—
You need not hear the strings that are tuning for the dawn—
Mingling, my dear, your breath with the quiet breath
Of sleep whom the old writers called the brother of Death.

The elements and the night are still being figured as outsiders, beggars or visitors, who crowd in upon the private space, but they allow the person being addressed some respite, in the form of sleep, before they make their final and unrefusable request. At the end of the poem, MacNeice finally sounds the ‘breath’/‘Death’ rhyme, but he allows death into the poem with its literary history on view, so that the uneasy proximity between sleep and death is something with a precedent in the works of ‘the old writers’. We might notice at the same time as we register this moment of literary distancing, that MacNeice's final line-break—‘your breath with the quite breath / Of sleep’—does not allow a speaking voice the time to pause for breath.

Irony, then, is really a technique of self-awareness for MacNeice in these lines, rather than an effect of verbal ‘mockery’. The particular case has a more general bearing, for MacNeice's supposedly ironic writing has often been held to be a sign of some more widespread, and perhaps fundamental, position of disengagement on his part. This is the case, certainly, for a number of MacNeice's critics, who have tended to see irony as a lack of serious commitment. But it is because it is so seriously poetry that MacNeice's work can appear deficient to those whose demands on verse have no room for the complications of language, pitch, rhythm, figure, or rhyme. In poetry, and especially in MacNeice's poetry, irony can never be separated from matters of technique: to ask why something is said is also to ask how the poet says it. Auden recognised this in MacNeice when he wrote, in 1939, of how the ‘marriage of a wayward anarchist nature to a precise technique has been happy; his nature prevents him from becoming academic and pedantic, his technique from romantic excess’.⁶

A poet's voice is an amalgam of ‘nature’ and ‘technique’, and MacNeice's particular pitch is one in which the technical precision and variety of his metrical practice are informed by a presence and sensibility that seem always on the alert. “Now that the shapes of mist” can be compared with a poem from near the end of MacNeice's career, “The Taxis” (1961), in which again there is a running conceit of life as a car-journey, or a series of bought rides. Now, however, MacNeice's formal self-awareness has become more extreme, something that appears at first almost a casual matter of a throwaway refrain:

In the first taxi he was alone tra-la,
No extras on the clock. He tipped ninepence
But the cabby, while he thanked him, looked askance
As though to suggest someone had bummed a ride.
In the second taxi he was alone tra-la
But the clock showed sixpence extra; he tipped according
And the cabby from out his muffler said: ‘Make sure
You have left nothing behind tra-la between you.’
In the third taxi he was alone tra-la
But the tip-up seats were down and there was an extra
Charge of one-and-sixpence and an odd
Scent that reminded him of a trip to Cannes.
As for the fourth taxi, he was alone
Tra-la when he hailed it but the cabby looked
Through him and said: ‘I can't tra-la well take
So many people, not to speak of the dog.’

Two elements develop in the course of the poem, and finally give it its shape, both of them ironic in some of the more harsh senses of the word. First, there is the recurring ‘tra-la’, a filler phrase along ballad lines perhaps, which strays out of what seems its proper place at the ends of lines into the middle (‘nothing behind tra-la between you’, ‘I can't tra-la well take / So many people’), so that we hear it as a strange blank, or a filling of time. Second, there is the odd logic of the narrative through these four stanzas, as the subject is accompanied by more and more people he cannot see. If we read the poem as a miniature parable, it is an account of the way in which the individual accrues increasingly numerous company—present in memory—in being conveyed through life, until the numbers grow impossible, and the journey can no longer be made. In the poem's alarming world, what is present to memory becomes prosaically present to the eye of a cabby, as a matter of extra fares. What might in another context seem intimate and utterly individual (that ‘odd / Scent’, for example) is here only another commonplace, and the subject for some gruff bad temper. Similarly, in another late poem MacNeice has Charon, the ferryman over the Styx, tell would-be passengers that ‘If you want to die you will have to pay for it’ (Collected Poems, 530.) Against this irony, MacNeice plays the recurring ‘tra-la’, in which the very movement of the verse seems to break up, and we hear a blank as something potentially threatening and incursive.

Like much of MacNeice's late poetry, “The Taxis” has made irony into a technique, rather than just a tone of voice or a pose of detachment. A great many of the late poems show how the properties of poetry—its rhythms and shapes—can be made to absorb and refigure the less reflective aspects of language—its clichés and dead-ends—and so become charged with a strange and unsettling energy. MacNeice himself saw this as a ‘nightmare’ aspect of his work, and it is true that much of the writing in his last two collections seems grimly braced against life's attritions, fears and catastrophes. In so far as MacNeice's own life became more overcast in these late years, the condition of irony for which his verse found the technical means was something he found himself living in, and (as it turned out) not living through. Here, perhaps, we encounter what Mahon means by ‘lost illusions’ as an undertone in MacNeice's voice; here, too, the world of private disappointment, guilt and dismay finds its expression—and transformation—in poetry.

LOST ILLUSIONS

In the early 1940s, MacNeice's poem “The Satirist” includes something close to a self-portrait:

Who is that man with eyes like a lonely dog?
Lonely is right. He knows that he has missed
What others miss unconsciously.

The insistence on ‘lonely’ is in a context that disables any merely sentimental reading, while the whole notion of missing things stretches from the missing associated with personal loss to the kind of missing that is a missing out on something. MacNeice's work as a whole spans a similar gap between intimate losses and more public, shared experiences of history's passing. In his long poem, Autumn Journal, MacNeice makes this gap vividly palpable. The poem ranges from the day-to-day life and work of its author in the period from August, 1938 until the New Year, as he goes to work in a London visibly preparing itself for war, to sustained considerations of education, philosophy, Ancient Greece, and the Munich crisis, and of personal memory (schooldays, a broken marriage, love-affairs) as well as of Ireland. In this largely autobiographical poem, MacNeice never lets his own life slip away too far from the life of a particular time and situation; this is what he means by calling Autumn Journal ‘both a panorama and a confession of faith’.⁷

The genre of a journal—a series of reports on life, with no overarching ‘plot’ to facilitate narrative or formal techniques of shaping the material—sets MacNeice free from several of the difficulties inherent in writing ‘political’ poetry. As the poet puts this in his prefatory note: ‘It is in the nature of this poem to be neither final nor balanced’ (Collected Poems, 101). The verse form itself, in which long and short lines alternate, but do not stick to any predictably set lengths, and in which rhyme is the norm, but a rhyme-scheme as such is seldom present, answers to the open-ended nature of MacNeice's undertaking. Having said all this, we might still see something of a centre to the wide and various panorama which Autumn Journal presents: this is the notion of loss, and of the missing that follows loss. It is this which brings together the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ in the poem: the historical events that press most on the poem, which include the Munich Crisis and the perilous condition of the threatened Spanish Republic, as well as an important by-election in Oxford (fought on the issue of appeasement) are all situations that spell out various kinds of defeat; personal losses are given almost as much weight, whether they involve the loss of a wife or a lover, or even that of a dog gone missing for a day, or whether they are both more general and more perplexing, as in the loss of childhood, or of youthful enthusiasms, or that of a homeland. Autumn Journal is an act of stocktaking on all these kinds of loss, in which MacNeice's voice finds registers for both what he calls the ‘didactic’ (describing the particulars of how things are) and the ‘lyric’ (making personal shapes and sense out of how things were, and how they might be).

One entire section of Autumn Journal is given over to Ireland, and it sits at the centre of the long poem as a meditation on the fate of political illusions and dogmas, which MacNeice intends to cast a sombre shadow over the English and European politics that dominate the rest of his poem. Again, this is done first in personal terms, since the poet makes it clear that it is his own childhood memories which fuel the meditation. As often in MacNeice's poetry, these memories are rendered as sounds: ‘the noise of shooting / Starting in the evening at eight / In Belfast in the York Street district’, or ‘the voodoo of the Orange bands / Drawing an iron net through darkest Ulster’. As the poetry gathers momentum, MacNeice's voice moves emphatically into a mode of denunciation, putting a curse on both Irish houses:

Up the Rebels, to Hell with the Pope,
                              And God save—as you prefer—the King or Ireland.
The land of scholars and saints:
                              Scholars and saints my eye, the land of ambush,
Purblind manifestoes, never-ending complaints,
                              The born martyr and the gallant ninny;
The grocer drunk with the drum,
                              The land-owner shot in his bed, the angry voices
Piercing the broken fanlight in the slum,
                              The shawled woman weeping at the garish altar.

(Collected Poems, 132)

Both ‘traditions’ in Irish politics have failed, and the force of MacNeice's writing through this section of the poem is one that constructs a kind of parallelism in denunciation: the poet is not so much even-handed as two-fisted in his response. The pitch of this voice is one that gains energy from the brutal stripping away of illusion and pretension; its condemnation of ‘Kathaleen ni Houlihan’ allows us to be touched—just for a moment—by the apparent pathos of ‘The shawled woman weeping at the garish altar’, but then lets us know how easy (and fatal) it is to wallow in such feelings. Similarly, the male, Protestant icon takes a hammering, while permitting us—again, just for an instant—to enjoy the misconceived historical glamour of his ‘tradition’:

Drums on the haycock, drums on the harvest, black
                              Drums in the night shaking the windows:
King William is riding his white horse back
                              To the Boyne on a banner.
Thousands of banners, thousands of white
                              Horses, thousands of Williams
Waving thousands of swords and ready to fight
                              Till the blue sea turns to orange.

As section XVI progresses, we share both the possible intoxications of Irish atavisms, and the sharp pangs of the contemporary hangovers they leave behind; MacNeice's procedure builds to a climax of across-the-board denunciation (‘I hate your grandiose airs, / Your sob-stuff, your laugh and your swagger, / Your assumption that everyone cares / Who is the king of your castle’). The truth is, as the poet adds immediately, that ‘Castles are out of date’, and this truth is something the reader of Autumn Journal has experienced at MacNeice's first hand, in the panorama of loss, indifference, and international wickedness which the poem so meticulously records. For MacNeice in 1938, Ireland's collective imagination is living out a complete, and disastrous, illusion: ‘Let the round tower stand aloof’, he writes savagely, ‘In a world of bursting mortar’.

What Ireland misses historically cannot be dissociated from MacNeice's sense of what he misses in Ireland. This is a complex state of affairs, and not one which a single poem can disentangle. In terms of the poet's own life, the scene of a profound early loss (that of his mother) is also a place to be revisited with perpetually mixed feelings; Carrickfergus is remembered as both a family home and a place of exile (‘We were in our minds’, MacNeice's sister recalled, ‘a West of Ireland family exiled from our homeland’)⁸; Northern Ireland is figured as somewhere very distinct from the West, in terms of personal mythology as well as of politics and geography; and the pitched antitheses of Autumn Journal are complicated increasingly by the competing pulls of loss and affection. In “The Strand” (1945), a poem written in memory of his father, MacNeice finds his most subtle and haunting image for the mixture of alienation and belonging which he feels, in the recollection of his father by the sea on Achill Island, ‘Carrying his boots and paddling like a child’:

Sixty-odd years behind him and twelve before,
Eyeing the flange of steel in the turning belt of brine
It was sixteen years ago he walked this shore
And the mirror caught his shape which catches mine
But then as now the floor-mop of the foam
Blotted the bright reflections—and no sign
Remains of face or feet when visitors have gone home.

The poem balances those ‘bright reflections’ against the erasing inevitability of ‘the floor-mop of the foam’, the vividness of recollection (and, by implication, loving recollection) against the flat facts of leaving and absence. Many of MacNeice's poems about Ireland are about light, and light's ability to transform or withdraw: ‘An Irish landscape’, he wrote, ‘is capable of pantomimic transformation scenes; one moment it will be desolate, dead, unrelieved monotone, the next it will be an indescribably shifting pattern of prismatic light’.⁹ Although in “The Strand” ‘no sign / remains’, it is the poem which inscribes the ‘visitors’ on this western landscape: MacNeice's writing here manages to concede the ephemerality of belonging at the same time as it celebrates its reality.

‘Visitors’ is, of course, a word heavy with implication, for however at home they may feel, these holidaymakers are also away from home. But from almost the beginning, MacNeice's poetry returns to images of homes, of houses and other dwelling-places, as the scenes of alienation and sometimes even dread. In his later poetry especially, MacNeice visits these strange, often haunted properties, which seem to contain much of his own childhood and adult life. “Selva Oscura” (whose title alludes to the dark wood in which Dante finds himself, in mid-life, at the beginning of the Divine Comedy) begins by saying that ‘A life can be haunted by those who were never there / If there was where they were missed’, and then goes on, in its second stanza, to re-shape and complicate this claim:

A life can be haunted by what it never was
If that were merely glimpsed. Lost in the maze
That means yourself and never out of the wood
These days, though lost, will be all your days;
Life, if you leave it, must be left for good.

MacNeice's sense of his own life as something ‘haunted / By what it never was’ certainly includes his feelings for and about Ireland. It is easy, and it has been too tempting over the years, to see this as symptomatic of a personality split in terms of its nationality, and fated by class and religion to be a perpetual tourist in a land to which it can never properly belong. But this is an oversimplification which MacNeice's poetry resists. The complexities of ‘home’ are certainly intended by MacNeice to be more than merely personal in their application, however intimate may be the sources of their images and recurring motifs. As far as Ireland is concerned, the poet's acute feeling for the ambiguities of belonging, the difficulties and awkwardnesses of leaving and returning, and the allures and liabilities of a tangled history, are not without their relevance for the too clear-cut schemes of ‘Irishness’ that crop up in a great deal of cultural and political discussion. Here as elsewhere, the poet's instinct for lost illusions seems richer and more fruitful than the continued promotion of those illusions.

In contemporary criticism, MacNeice remains a name to divide Irish critics. For some, he is still not quite ‘Irish’ enough, or under suspicion on account of the supposed allegiances of his modern advocates. It would be difficult, on the other hand, to find many poets (Irish or British) for whom such suspicions are meaningful, and MacNeice's work looks much more securely established now, in canonical terms, than it did at the time of his death. The poet's significance in contemporary poetry is more to do with the resources, complexity and memorability of his voice than it is with the endlessly-debatable definitions or appropriations of his nationality. In this respect, he is a central and indispensable presence, and remains one of the most exhilarating, haunting and substantial Irish poets since Yeats.

Notes

1. Derek Mahon, ‘MacNeice's London’, Poetry (Chicago), vol. 167, no. 1-2 (October 1995), p. 36.

2. W. H. Auden, ‘August for the people and their favourite islands’ (1935), and ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats's (1939), The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), pp. 157, 242.

3. ‘I notice that many of the poems here have been trying to get out of the “iambic” groove which we were all born into.’ ‘Louis MacNeice writes … [on The Burning Perch]’, Poetry Book Society Bulletin 38 (Sept. 1963), repr. in Alan Heuser (ed.), Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 247.

4. Louis MacNeice, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), pp. 29-30.

5. Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems ed. E. R. Dodds (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), p. 539. Henceforth cited in the text as Collected Poems.

6. W. H. Auden, ‘Louis MacNeice’, in We Moderns: Gotham Book Mart 1920-1940 (New York: Gotham Book Mart, n.d. [1939]), p. 48; repr. in Edward Mendelson (ed.), W. H. Auden: Prose Volume II 1939-1948 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p. 35.

7. Louis MacNeice, letter to T. S. Eliot, 22 Nov. 1938, quoted in Robyn Marsack, The Cave of Making: The Poetry of Louis MacNeice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 43.

8. Elizabeth Nicholson, ‘Trees were green’, in Terence Brown and Alec Reid (eds.), Time Was Away: The World of Louis MacNeice (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1974), p. 217.

9. Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1941), (2nd edn. London: Faber and Faber, 1967), p. 50.