“Self-assertion more often than not is vulgar, but a live and vulgar dog who keeps on barking is better than a dead lion, however dignified.” — Louis MacNeice
Born in Belfast on this day in 1907, Louis MacNeice went to public school, and then attended Oxford. When you read reviews of MacNeice’s stuff from other poets, the opinions are wildly divergent. Some are annoyed, some are enthusiastic – there is not a consensus. He was a brilliant scholar of the classics, and did many translations. His background was public-school all the way, and Oxford set him free. He went on to work for the BBC, producing radio plays (which he often also wrote). In fact, this job would end up causing his death. After recording a radio play in a damp cave, he caught pneumonia and died.
His generation – and the poets/writers who were his contemporaries (Auden, Stephen Spender, all people he knew personally) – had to deal with the giants of the generation immediately preceding it. You know, little-known folks like Yeats and Eliot. Their influence was so total it was impossible to ignore. You could barely even define yourself against these figures. It’s like deciding to go after Ali or Tyson’s crown: you had BEST know what you are doing first, and choose your approach beforehand. You can’t just declaim it and have it be so. The poets of MacNeice’s generation took different individualized approaches to these challenges of influence, everyone struggled in different ways.
MacNeice lived most of his life in London. He supported Home Rule for Ireland. I don’t think he ever thought of moving back to Belfast, but he never felt truly English. I think that sensation of separateness was exciting for him as an artist. It put him in a state of almost constant duality: here but also there, here and also not-here. He loved living in London, but he was very proud of his Irish-ness. He lived in the “between” state of the exile. And his poems take on Irish subjects, he speaks of Ireland repeatedly. MacNeice’s nostalgia was tempered by realism. This makes for a very interesting tone.
This poem has always killed me:
Autobiography
In my childhood trees were green
And there was plenty to be seen.
Come back early or never come.
My father made the walls resound,
He wore his collar the wrong way round.
Come back early or never come.
My mother wore a yellow dress;
Gently, gently, gentleness.
Come back early or never come.
When I was five the black dreams came;
Nothing after was quite the same.
Come back early or never come.
The dark was talking to the dead;
The lamp was dark beside my bed.
Come back early or never come.
When I woke they did not care;
Nobody, nobody was there.
Come back early or never come.
When my silent terror cried,
Nobody, nobody replied.
Come back early or never come.
I got up; the chilly sun
Saw me walk away alone.
Come back early or never come.
And here’s another one. You can feel the journalistic drive here, it’s very “just the facts, ma’am”.
Carrickfergus
I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries
To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams:
Thence to Smoky Carrick in County Antrim
Where the bottle-neck harbour collects the mud which jams
The little boats beneath the Norman castle,
The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;
The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses
But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind and halt.
The brook ran yellow from the factory stinking of chlorine,
The yarn-milled called its funeral cry at noon;
Our lights looked over the Lough to the lights of Bangor
Under the peacock aura of a drowning moon.
The Norman walled this town against the country
To stop his ears to the yelping of his slave
And built a church in the form of a cross but denoting
The List of Christ on the cross, in the angle of the nave.
I was the rector’s son, born to the Anglican order,
Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor;
The Chichesters knelt in marble at the end of a transept
With ruffs about their necks, their portion sure.
The war came and a huge camp of soldiers
Grew from the ground in sight of our house with long
Dummies hanging from gibbets for bayonet practice
And the sentry’s challenge echoing all day long.
I went to school in Dorset, the world of parents
Contracted into a puppet world of sons
Far from the mill girls, the smell of porter, the salt mines
And the soldiers with their guns.
QUOTES:
Louis MacNeice:
Yeats proposed to turn his back on desire and hatred; Eliot sat back and watched other peoples’ emotions with ennui and an ironical self-pity … The whole poetry, on the other hand, of Auden, Spender, and Day-Lewis implies that they have desires and hatreds of their own and, further, that they think some things ought to be desired and others hated … My own prejudice … is in favour of poets whose worlds are not too esoteric. I would have a poet able-bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.
Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
W.H. Auden, whose obvious brilliance daunted his contemporaries, was the central figure in this group At various times during his time at Oxford, he befriended fellow students Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis, and made the acquaintance of Louis MacNeice. These poets were given a collective identity when Michael Toberts published them together in an anthology, New Signatures (1932). They prided themselves on understatement and “social concern.” Since the early part of their careers coincided with the Great Depression across the industrialized world and the rise of fascism in Europe, they were eager to express radical political attitudes, but then often did so through older verse techniques. Except for their preference for inherited poetic forms, they were strenuously ahead of their time, not least in their use of the specialized vocabularies of politics, psychiatry, and the social sciences. After World War II led to the cold war, they became more centrist in their political views.
Christopher Hitchens, “Ireland. ‘We Ourselves’: Suffering, Faith, and Redemption”, Critical Quarterly, Spring 1998 – here on global homogenization:
Louis MacNeice, literary orphan and still neglected child of the Auden/Day-Lewis/Spender school, saw this coming, in a way. I love his poetry, for its combination of sly and subtle effects and bold, open strokes. His autobiography is told in the poem “Carrickfergus”:
I was the rector’s son, born to the Anglican order,
Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor;
The Chichesters knelt in marble at the end of a transept
With ruffs about their necks, their portion sure.
Louis MacNeice, The Strings are False: An Unfinished Autobiography:
When we went through the town there were always men standing at the corners–standing there at least till the pubs opened–in shiny blue suits and dirty collarless shirts fastened with a collar-stud, and cloth caps pulled down over narrow-leering eyes, and sour mouths which did not open when they spoke but which twisted sideways as they spat. The pavement around them was constellated with spittle and on the drab cement walls at their back there was chalked up ‘To Hell With the Pope.’
Conrad Aiken:
For sheer readability, for speed, lightness, and easy intellectual range, [the verse] is in a class by itself…[But] it is too topical, too transitory, too reportorial. It has very little residual magic.
Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets
Temperamentally he was engaged by facts rather than programs; solving orthodoxies made no sense to him. Auden moved across the political spectrum, but MacNeice stayed politically “between,” not passionately, like George Orwell, but quizzically. “Between” is a favorite word and stance in the early poems, different from Auden’s connective “between”. In MacNeice it signifies suspension: “In a between world, a world of amber” one poem begins. In “Epitaph for Liberal Poets” it is clear that he is not even able to conform to liberal humanism. He acknowledges the approach of the “tight-lipped technocratic Conquistadors”; his stance is Mark Antony’s, lamenting in acceptance the inevitable triumph of Caesar, hoping the poems will survive to thaw out in another age.
Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, September 11, 1963:
Did you read about MacNeice’s death? I saw him in London looking very firm and in good spirits, though Bill Alfred said he would be dead soon from drinking. I liked some of his poems, more the early ones, very much. Always a smart mind and eye, and a spring in the rhythm.
British Leftist Poetry, 1930-40
By a bitter Hugh MacDiarmid
Auden, MacNeice, Day Lewis, I have read them all,
Hoping against hope to hear the authentic call.
“A tragical disappointment. There was I
Hoping to hear old Aeschylus, when the Herald
Called out, “Theognis, bring your chorus forward.’
Imagine what my feelings must have been!
But then Dexitheus pleased me coming forward
And singing his Boeotian melody:
But next came Chaeris with his music truly,
That turned me sick and killed me very nearly.
And never in my lifetime, man nor boy,
Was I so vexed as at the present moment;
To see the Pnyx, at this time of the morning,
Quite empty, when the Assembly should be full:
And know the explanation I must pass is this:
–You cannot light a match on a crumbling wall.
Michael Schmidt:
Riddles and nursery rhymes attracted him early on. And hymns. Later, the sagas, medieval allegory and the Horatian odes. He chooses two different styles, one vivid, documentary, engagingly particular and linguistically inventive, the other argumentative and analytical. The poet he sees like the broadcaster and journalist, as an extension of the common man, engaging his problems, renewing his language, but not necessarily offering answers.
W.H. Auden, joking about the poets of his crowd being lumped together into a collective entity called:
“Daylewisaudenmacneicespender”
Christopher Hitchens, “Ireland. ‘We Ourselves’: Suffering, Faith, and Redemption”, Critical Quarterly, Spring 1998 – here on global homogenization:
He had no liking for the raw essences of Ulster; the grit and bone and harshness of it, and the fierce sectarianism. (A love perhaps, but I repeat, no liking). He yearned for a little taste, a little elevation and refinement. Not only did he not like the bang of the Lambeg drum, he had discovered that at least one side of his family were recent converts from Catholicism.
Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Robert Lowell, October 11, 1963:
It is sad about MacNeice–I liked his early poems very much and have two books of his–those lovely descriptions of Ireland, etc.
Louis MacNeice on antiquity:
It was all so unimaginably different, and all so long ago.
Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
MacNeice is of a similar Anglo-Irish background [to C. Day Lewis], but his verse is less ceremonious, more alert to historical particularities and his ambivalent participation in them.
Clive James, Commentary, October 1973:
[Auden’s] friend Louis MacNeice had once written that after a certain time the poet loses the right to get his finished poems back. Auden didn’t agree with MacNeice’s humility, just as he had never agreed with MacNeice’s sense of usefulness: MacNeice had tired himself out serving the BBC instead of the Muse.
Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, April 6, 1964
What I saw of MacNeice in magazines looked denser than he’d been for a long time, but I don’t have the book yet.
“Daylewisaudenmacneicespender”
Christopher Hitchens, “Ireland. ‘We Ourselves’: Suffering, Faith, and Redemption”, Critical Quarterly, Spring 1998 – here on global homogenization:
In his beautiful long later poem ‘Autumn Journal,’ when MacNeice was to curse repeatedly the false loyalties and strange oaths of Ulster, and call down a plague on the Romans and the Orangemen and the bombast and the sentimentality (a lethal and toxic combination, by the by, as of the drunken and impotent wife-smasher, or the sobbing and self-pitying hostage-taker, or the slobber and glare of a weak king), he still gave it the common name of Irish and asked, parodying I think another author’s sarcastic question:
Such was my country and I thought I was well
Out of it, educated and domiciled in England,
Though yet her name keeps ringing like a bell
In an under-water belfry.
Why do we like being Irish? Partly because
It gives us a hold on the sentimental English …
Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
MacNeice exercises what he takes to be the modern poet’s privilege of irresolution: he dramatizes the mind’s tentative advances and questionings in poems of frank ambivalence. In a series of lectures on allegory, Varieties of Parable (1965), MacNeice applauds Samuel Beckett’s statement that he is interested in the “shape of ideas” even if he does not believe in them. MacNeice makes his poetry out of the experience of a fallen world, without wistful glances back at an Eden of metaphysical belief or ideological certitude.
Louis MacNeice:
My sympathies are Left. But not in my heart or my guts.
Michael Schmidt:
He is the Kavanagh to Auden’s Clarke.
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