Walker MacNeice and The Irish Poetry of His Time

OUP CORRECTED PROOF FINAL, 14/8/2015, SPi
OXFORD ENGLISH MONOGRAPHS

General Editors
helen barr paulina kewes hermione lee
laura marcus david norbrook
seamus perry fiona stafford
Louis MacNeice and

the Irish Poetry
of his Time
T O M WA L K E R
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the Universitys objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
# Tom Walker 2015
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2015
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014960249
ISBN 9780198745150
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Acknowledgements
This project has entailed many hours in libraries and archives, and I would
like to thank the following institutions and their staff: the Bodleian Library,
Oxford; the Oxford University Press Archive; the Archive Centre at Kings
College, Cambridge; the British Library; the BBC Written Archives; the
BBC Northern Ireland Community Archive; Special Collections at
Queens University, Belfast; the University of Ulster Library; the Linen
Hall Library, Belfast; the Public Records Ofce of Northern Ireland;
Trinity College Library, Dublin; the National Library of Ireland; the
Berg Collection at New York Public Library; the Rare Book and Manu-
script Library at Columbia University; Special Collections at SUNY Buf-
falo; and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
Research trips were supported by awards from the British Association of
Irish Studies, Lincoln College, Oxford, and the Oxford English Faculty.
Earlier versions of some of the material presented in this book appeared
in: Brian Grifn and Ellen McWilliams, eds, Irish Studies in Britain
(Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011); The Review of English
Studies 62.257 (November 2011); and Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis, eds,
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012). My thanks to the editors and publishers of those volumes.
Quotations from Louis MacNeices writings are reproduced with the
permission of David Higham Associates, quotations from W.R. Rodgerss
writings with the permission of Lucy Rodgers Cohen, through the Marsh
Agency, and quotations from John Hewitts writings with the permission
of Keith Millar, through the John Hewitt Society. A letter from Robert
Greacen to Rodgers is quoted by kind permission of the estate of the late
Robert Greacen, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency. Richard
Murphy kindly granted permission for the quotation of a letter by him to
MacNeice. The BBC has granted permission for the quotation of material
from their written archives. Payment for some of these permissions was
made possible by the award of a Patrick Kavanagh Bursary administered
by the Trinity Trust on behalf of the School of English, Trinity College
Dublin. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and any
omissions will be rectied at the earliest opportunity.
At Oxford University Press, I would like to thank Jacqueline Baker,
Rachel Platt, Lucy McClune, Gayathri Manoharan, Dan Harding, and
Denise Bannerman for their guidance through the editorial and production
process.
vi Acknowledgements
This book grew out of my doctoral thesis and I would like to thank my
supervisor, Peter McDonald, for all his support over the years; his con-
dence in my work kept me going more than he realizes. The comments of
my DPhil examiners, Edna Longley and Bernard ODonoghue, were of
great help in revising the manuscript for publication. It was Bernard who
rst taught me about Irish literature as an undergraduate and I am grateful
too for his many other kindnesses over the years.
I began thinking seriously about MacNeices poetry while an MPhil
student at Trinity College Dublin under the insightful guidance of
Terence Brown. I am now lucky enough to be back at Trinity and
would like to thank all of my colleagues there for helping to foster such
a convivial and supportive environment in which to work.
Adrian Paterson and Matthew Sperling kindly spared time to read
sections of the manuscript. John Kennedy and Justin MacGregor offered
a warm welcome in New York, as did Caroline Magennis in Belfast.
Jonathan Allison, while editing MacNeices letters, generously sent me
some of his transcriptions. Elizabeth Robertson let me read her fascinating
research on the role of Irish writers at the BBC. For various other
enlightenments and encouragements along the way, I would also like
to thank: Sharon Achinstein, Lauren Arrington, Ros Ballaster, Jamie
Baxendine, Sarah Bennett, Matthew Campbell, Claire Connolly, Richard
Danson Brown, Jon Day, Jeremy Dimmick, Alex Feldman, Roy Foster,
Jonathan Gharraie, Sue Jones, Andrew Kahn, John Kelly, John Kerrigan,
Ben Levitas, Claire Lynch, Peter McCullough, Thomas Marks, Margaret
Mills Harper, Michael Molan, John Morgenstern, Emilie Morin, Kathryn
Murphy, Lucy Newlyn, Jenni Nuttall, Tom Paulin, Piers Pennington,
Thomas Roebuck, Alex Russell, Fiona Stafford, the late Jon Stallworthy,
Wes Williams, Clair Wills, Michelle Witen, and Duncan Wu. I would not
have been able to nish this book without the love and support of my
parents. My greatest debt is to Hannah Godfrey, my best friend and
longest suffering reader.
Contents
Introduction 1
1. Yeatss MacNeice 11
2. Racial and Regional Rhythms 47
3. Letters Home 79
4. Irish Characters 107
5. A Little Solemnity 135
6. MacNeices Byzantium 158
Bibliography 189
Index 207
Introduction
In the summer of 1959, Louis MacNeice travelled to South Africa. He gave

a series of lectures at the University of Cape Town, staying in the city for
four weeks before travelling on to talk in Johannesburg.1 A record of these
occasions survives in seven notebooks held at New York Public Library.2
On a few sheets of paper tucked into the back of one of these, MacNeice
jotted down some page references under the heading Irish Reading:3
Oxford 114Percy French
187Pangur Bn
239Higgins
261P.K. Potato-Spraying or 266
303W.R.R.
313The Pets
St. Ballads 20Galway Races
46Rocks of Baun
142Mrs McGrath
192 (fr verse from)The Redhead Mans Wife
He is drawing on two anthologies, The Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1958),
edited by Donagh MacDonagh and Lennox Robinson, and Irish Street
Ballads (1939) compiled by Colm O Lochlainn. In another of these Cape
Town notebooks, the same poems from the MacDonagh and Robinson
anthology are again specied:
poetryHiggins, Austin Clarke, Kavanagh
Higgins 239 ox bk.
rd Kavanagh 261 or 266 ox bk.
Rodgers 303 ox bk.
Farren 313 ox bk.4
1
Jon Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 4348.
2
Louis MacNeice, Notes for University Lectures in Cape Town, New York Public
Library, Berg Collection, MacNeice Papers, 64B561464B5820.
3
Louis MacNeice, Notebook 1: Irish Dramatists, New York Public Library, Berg
Collection, MacNeice Papers, 64B5614.
4
Louis MacNeice, Notebook 3: Irish Contrib., New York Public Library, Berg
Collection, MacNeice Papers, 64B5616.
2 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

Putting to one side Patrick Kavanaghs Spraying the Potatoes and the
mention of Austin Clarke, the poems and poets referred to in these lists are
not well known.5 It is something of a surprise to think that MacNeice
chose to recite The Pets by the Catholic nationalist poet Robert Farren
(Roiberd Farachin), an extract from his 1944 long poem The First
Exile about the life of St Columba, which playfully recounts the saints
miraculous resurrection of a cat, a wren, and a y, or that he recited
Father and Son by the neo-revivalist F.R. Higgins, a meditation on grief
that is also an avowal of identity:
walking longside an old weir
Of my peoples, where nothing stirsonly the shadowed
Leaden ight of a heron up the lean air
I went unmanly with grief, knowing how my father,
Happy though captive in years, walked last with me there.6
A MacNeice engaged by the poetry of Higgins and Farren, not to mention
Irish street ballads, is an unfamiliar gure.
This snapshot of MacNeice reading The Sporting Races of Galway or
Robin Flowers translation of Pangur Bn complicates Robert Welchs
assertion, when comparing MacNeice with W.B. Yeats, that:
Yeatss and MacNeices relations with Ireland are, I suppose, still of some
interest, but I would suggest that we have now arrived at an understanding of
their work and its place in Irish and Anglo-Irish tradition, which allows us to
take it for granted that each poet, in different ways, was utterly obsessed with
Ireland and her history, and that this concern animates almost every line they
wrote in form, phrasing, political and moral awareness, and the kind of
philosophical weather their poetry creates.7
MacNeices Cape Town notes support Welchs sense of MacNeices
obsession with Ireland and her history, but they challenge the notion
that his works place in Irish and Anglo-Irish tradition is understood. The
poetry he chose to read aloud in South Africa falls beyond critical assess-
ments of his relationship to this tradition, and for the most part lies at the
5
The poems referred to from the Oxford anthology are: an extract from Percy Frenchs
The Queens Afterdinner Speech; Robin Flowers translation from the Irish of Pangur Bn;
F.R. Higginss Father and Son; Patrick Kavanaghs Spraying the Potatoes and Memory
of Brother Michael; W.R. Rodgerss Lifes Circumnavigators; Robert Farrens The Pets.
The ballads referred to from O Lochlainns collection are: The Sporting Races of Galway;
A New Song on the Rocks of Baun; Mrs McGrath; The Red-Haired Mans Wife.
6
Donagh MacDonagh and Lennox Robinson, eds, The Oxford Book of Irish Verse
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 23940.
7
Robert Welch, Yeats and MacNeice: A Night-Seminar with Francis Stuart, in
Kathleen Devine and Alan J. Peacock, eds, Louis MacNeice and his Inuence (Gerrards
Cross: Colin Smythe, 1998), 119: 3.
Introduction 3
fringes of accounts of twentieth-century Irish literary history. If Mac-
Neices interest in these poems is little understood, then that may be
because the poems have been unregarded. Literary history can have a
selective relationship with the past, jumping from one point to another as
a particular tradition or canon is retrospectively traced or formed.
Together with other supposed precursors such as Patrick Kavanagh,
Austin Clarke, Denis Devlin, or John Hewitt, MacNeice is often repre-
sented as an enabling stepping stone in conceptions of Irish or Northern
Irish poetic history, offering a pathway from a seemingly distant yet
overbearing point of origin (Yeats, James Joyce, the Literary Revival,
modernism) to the productive near-present, in the shape of those poets
who came to maturity in the 1960s, such as (in the case of MacNeice)
Derek Mahon and Michael Longley.8 Dillon Johnstons Irish Poetry after
Joyce (1985) embeds this idea into its structure, pairing a contemporary
poet and a predecessor in each chapter, including MacNeice with
Mahon.9 Neil Corcorans After Yeats and Joyce (1997) classies MacNeice
as one of three precursors (with Hewitt and Brian Moore) to a post-
1960s owering of Northern Irish literature.10 Jon Curleys 2011 mono-
graph on Northern Irish poetry considers MacNeice with W.R. Rodgers
in a chapter on Protestant prototypes.11 Such teleological narratives risk
conating MacNeices literary afterlife with the complexities of his lived
creative life and underestimate the limitations of many accounts of mid-
twentieth-century Irish literary history.
A sense of MacNeices past having been occluded occurs in a review by
Roy McFadden of Stallworthys biography. Born in 1921 and with his
rst collection, Swords and Ploughshares, having been published in 1943,
McFadden complains that Stallworthy has skipped a generation in ascrib-
ing MacNeices reclamation to the next generation of Northern Irish
poets, including Mahon, Longley, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and
Tom Paulin. He asserts that the next generation of Northern Irish poets
to MacNeice consisted of Maurice Craig, Robert Greacen, Padraic Fiacc,
John Montague, and himself:
MacNeices work was always, in those far-off, forgotten days, admired by my
contemporaries. I reviewed his Collected Poems 19251948 when it was
8
On the Whiggish nature of Irish cultural history more generally, see: Joe Cleary,
Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (Dublin: Field Day Publica-
tions, 2006), 76110.
9
Dillon Johnston, Irish Poetry after Joyce (Mountrath: Dolmen Press, 1985), 20446.
10
Neil Corcoran, After Yeats and Joyce: Reading Modern Irish Literature (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 13140.
11
Jon Curley, Poets and Partitions: Confronting Communal Identities in Northern Ireland
(Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2011), 4473.

published in 1949, and, shortly after his death, together with W.R. Rodgers,
I broadcast a tribute to him, while Mercy Hunter stood in tears at the studio.
I too celebrated him in a poem, but during his lifetime, and, at an early
meeting, I was able to tell him that the rst book of modern verse I bought
out of my pocket-money was his Selected Poems, published in 1940.12
A different Belfast is evoked in answer to Stallworthys sense of Mac-
Neices solely posthumous acceptance. But as hinted by McFaddens
assertion that he knew MacNeice and his work in the 1940s, this earlier
next generation of Northern Irish poets also had an impact on MacNeice
that has, as yet, gone largely unexplored.
In 1974, Mahon claimed that MacNeice had no place in the intellec-
tual history of modern Irelandpresumably to make his own recovery of
MacNeice all the more striking.13 Much has come to light since to
complicate this poetical positioning. Terence Brown has drawn attention
to MacNeices (mostly frustrated) attempts to become involved in Ire-
lands intellectual history, including his term as poetry editor of the
Dublin periodical The Bell.14 Edna Longley and Gillian McIntosh have
both examined how MacNeice, together with writers such as Hewitt,
Rodgers, Sam Hanna Bell, and Sam Thompson, played a part in promot-
ing a progressive politics in Northern Ireland.15 MacNeice did not, unlike
Yeats or Sen OFaolin, take a central role in the intellectual history of
modern Ireland, but he was not a Joycean exile either. Moreover, the life
he lived and the letters he wrote question Mahons view that MacNeices
contemporaries were not Frank OConnor, Denis Johnston and Patrick
Kavanagh, but Cyril Connolly, Noel Coward and William Empson.16
MacNeice was familiar with many Irish writers and their work, including
Mahons examples. Johnston and MacNeice, who both spent the Second
World War working for the BBC, were friends. During the summer of
1945, Johnston stayed with MacNeice and his family in County Mayo,
12
Roy McFadden, Corrigibly Plural (review of Jon Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice),
Fortnight: An Independent Review of Politics and Arts 337 (March 1995), 412: 41.
13
Derek Mahon, MacNeice in England and Ireland, in Terence Brown and Alec Reid,
eds, Time was Away: The World of Louis MacNeice (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1974), 11322:
11314.
14
Terence Brown, MacNeices Irelands, MacNeices Islands, in Vincent Newey and
Ann Thompson, eds, Literature and Nationalism (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
1991), 22538. MacNeice was listed as poetry editor of The Bell from January 1946
until May 1947.
15
Edna Longley, Progressive Bookmen: Left-wing Politics and Ulster Protestant
Writers, in The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle: Bloodaxe
Books, 1994), 10729; Gillian McIntosh, The Force of Culture: Unionist Identities in
Twentieth-Century Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), 180219.
16
Mahon, MacNeice in England and Ireland, 113.
Introduction 5
where they were taking an extended holiday.17 MacNeice knew OConnor,
writing to Laurence Gilliam (his boss in the BBC Features Department) also
in 1945 that: The Dublin intelligentsia are more disgruntled than ever;
Frank OConnor says the only Irish landscape he likes is Kilkenny because it
reminds him of England.18 He also admired OConnors work, mentioning
in another letter to Gilliam having read nearly all his extremely good stories,
having in 1941 praised OConnors excellent translations of Irish-language
poetry.19 MacNeice and Kavanaghs paths crossed too. Only fragments
survive of Kavanaghs unpublished poem The Ballad of the Palace Bar,
but it recorded a row that broke out in Dublin in 1939 when Austin Clarke
insulted MacNeice, according to Kavanagh, with the words: Let him go
back and labour for Faber and Faber. Then in 1960, MacNeice produced a
reading of The Great Hunger (1942) for BBC radio, which Kavanagh
introduced.20
Knowledge of MacNeices involvement in mid-twentieth-century Irish
cultural life has yet to translate into a broad understanding of how his
poems engaged with the work of his Irish contemporaries. In several
accounts, MacNeice is seen as tangentially belonging to the Irish tradition
through his engagement with the work of Yeats, most prominent in The
Poetry of W.B. Yeats, but also recurring in essays and reviews through his
career, as well as in the Yeatsian echoes and allusions in his poetry. Edna
Longley suggests that MacNeices Anglo-Irish hybridization is revealed
through his consciousness of Yeatss signicance for twentieth-century
poetry in general and Irish poetry in particular.21 In a wide-ranging
account of the Yeatsian succession that also considers Kavanagh, Clarke,
and Higgins, she identies MacNeice as the only poet both to receive
Yeats dialectically and to develop the Yeatsian dialectic.22 Building on her
and others analyses, investigation of MacNeices engagement with Yeatss
work forms a major aspect of this book.
17
Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice, 336.
18
Louis MacNeice to Lawrence Gilliam, 12 June [1945], BBC Written Archives,
LI/285/2.
19
Louis MacNeice to Lawrence Gilliam, 14 July [1945], BBC Written Archives,
LI/285/2; MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats, 49.
20
Antoinette Quinn, Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan,
2001), 127, 306, 3945.
21
Edna Longley, Louis MacNeice: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 1988),
278.
22
Edna Longley, It is time that I wrote my will: Anxieties of Inuence and
Succession, in Warwick Gould and Edna Longley, eds, Yeats Annual 12. That Accusing
Eye: Yeats and his Irish Readers (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 11762: 156. Longleys
account of MacNeices successful reception of Yeats is extended in Yeats and Modern Poetry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 16882.

However, this sense of a successful grappling with the legacy of Yeats
has also offered an implicit rationale for MacNeices most prominent
position in recent formations of Irish literary history: his posthumous
identication as an enabling inuence by recent Northern Irish poets
(Mahon, Longley, Muldoon, Paulin, and others). As Fran Brearton out-
lines, these poets have become the lens through which MacNeice is now
viewed, having retrospectively reformed the literary canon to bring his
reputation to rest in Ireland.23 Two volumes of essays and several articles
have focused on MacNeices legacy, mostly in relation to Northern
Ireland.24 However, such is the strength of the idea of MacNeice as a
homeless outsider posthumously assimilated into Irish culture that literary
history risks being distorted to make his career better t within this
narrative. For instance, Elmer Kennedy-Andrewss recent study of North-
ern Irish poetry since 1968 characterizes MacNeice as a nomad later
appropriated by Northern Irish poets, presenting him as living in a
limbo between England and Ireland and migrating between the North
and the South of Irelandan overwrought way of saying that MacNeice
lived in England but visited friends and family in the North and South of
Ireland. This is followed by the observation that for some fellow poets
MacNeice does not qualify as an Irish poet at all, illustrated by the
alleged fact that he goes unrepresented in both Montagues and Kinsel-
las anthologies of Irish poetry.25 But MacNeices work does appear in
Montagues Faber Book of Irish Verse (1974) and Thomas Kinsellas New
Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1986). Indeed, MacNeices poetry was also
included in the original 1958 Oxford Book of Irish Verse, which, as
discussed above, he drew on in South Africa, as well as Faber and Fabers
1949 anthology Contemporary Irish Poetry, edited by Greacen and
Valentin Iremonger. This complicates somewhat any account of his
rescue from literary limbo.
Drawing on archival research, this book places MacNeices work within
the earlier, less familiar, frame suggested both by McFaddens criticism of
Stallworthys ignorance of the poets contemporary Northern Irish
admirers, and the poems and ballads noted down for his Irish Reading
23
Fran Brearton, The Great War in Irish Poetry: W.B. Yeats to Michael Longley (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), 147.
24
Devine and Peacock, eds, Louis MacNeice and his Inuence; Fran Brearton and Edna
Longley, eds, Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his Legacy (Manchester: Carcanet,
2012); Edna Longley, The Room Where MacNeice Wrote Snow , in The Living Stream,
25270; Peter McDonald, Louis MacNeices Posterity, in Serious Poetry: Form and
Authority from Yeats to Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 16786.
25
Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland
19682008 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008), 37.
Introduction 7
in 1959. Uncovering the extent of MacNeices contact with a range of
Irish cultural milieu allows his work to be considered in the context of the
poetry written by his contemporaries rather than his successors. In this
regard, an attempt to recover the English, as opposed to the Irish,
MacNeice is, counter-intuitively, instructive.26 Richard Danson Browns
study, Louis MacNeice and the Poetry of the 1930s (2009) considers
MacNeices poems of the 1930s among those of his English contempor-
aries Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, and W.H. Auden. The question of
MacNeices Englishness is put to one side as Danson Brown shows that his
identity is less important than what his poems do, by exploring how they
respond to similar historical pressures in distinctive yet dialogic ways to
the poems of these contemporaries. This book similarly puts questions of
MacNeices Irishness mainly to one side. While accepting Welchs asser-
tion that it can be assumed that he was utterly obsessed with Ireland and
her history, it extends understanding of MacNeices relationship to the
Irish and Anglo-Irish tradition by exploring how his poems respond to
similar historical pressures in distinctive yet dialogic ways to those of his
Irish contemporaries.27
In illuminating MacNeices relationship with the Irish poetry of his
time, this book builds on a body of research that has emerged in recent
decades, offering a more detailed picture of Irish culture of the period
between the Literary Revival and the 1960s.28 To extend Alan Gilliss
sense that the 1930s have retrospectively been viewed in literary history as
an almighty comedown, so masking the range and achievement of Irish
writers, the two decades that followed have also often been depicted, in
all-too-broad brushstrokes, as part of a mid-century cultural mire, obscur-
ing the fact that Irish culture at the time was a vivid and mutating
arena.29 The difcult social, economic, and political pressures experi-
enced by mid-century writers cannot be denied, but they should inform
rather than subsume the terms of analysis. From a poetical viewpoint,
Gilliss study is one of several inclusive introductions, histories, and critical
responses that have worked towards considering seemingly singular gures
such as Clarke and Kavanagh as part of the cultural dynamic that gave rise
to such poets as Denis Devlin and Brian Coffey and that also shaped
26
Richard Danson Brown, Louis MacNeice and the Poetry of the 1930s (Tavistock:
Northcote House, 2009), 67.
27
Welch, Yeats and MacNeice: A Night-Seminar with Francis Stuart, 3.
28
Exemplary works include Terence Browns Ireland: A Social and Cultural History
19222002 (rev. edn, London: Harper Perennial, 2004), rst published in 1981, and, more
recently, Clair Wills, That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second
World War (London: Faber and Faber, 2007).
29
Alan Gillis, Irish Poetry of the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1.

poetic developments north of the border.30 Another important inuence
on the focus of this study has been a growing awareness of the institutional
contexts of literary production and reception, such as the BBC or Irelands
periodical culture.31
Moving from the 1930s to the 1960s, the studys four central chapters
reveal how MacNeices poetry operated in direct and indirect dialogue
with a wide array of other Irish contemporaries, including Higgins,
Clarke, Farren, Hewitt, Rodgers, McFadden, Kavanagh, Montague, Kin-
sella, Anthony Cronin, and Richard Murphy. Chapter 2 focuses on the
prolonged periods that MacNeice spent in Ireland at the beginning and
end of the Second World War, illustrating his interaction with the poetry
he found there, such as Higginss neo-revivalism and Hewitts regional-
ism. Chapter 3 situates Hewitts ideas regarding Northern Irish literature
in relation to a widespread emphasis on regionalism throughout post-war
Britain and Ireland. Much of MacNeices poetry seems to operate at a
remove from this trend, offering urbane responses to foreign travel and
celebrating the uid forms of community to be found through friendship.
Yet the chapter argues that these works constitute a conicted response to
regionalist rhetoric. Against the backdrop of his involvement in the (never-
to-be-published) Character of Ireland book project, the next two chap-
ters discuss MacNeices poetry from the late 1940s to the late 1950s.
Chapter 4 uncovers MacNeices involvement with Irish literary matters
30
Lucy Collins, Editorial: Reading Irish Poetry Cultures, 19301970, Irish University
Review 42.1 (Spring 2012), 15: 1. As well as the contributions to this special issue and
Gilliss study above, see: Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis, eds, Modernism and Ireland:
The Poetry of the 1930s (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995); Gregory A. Schirmer, Out of
What Began: A History of Irish Poetry in English (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1998); John Goodby, Irish Poetry Since 1950: From Stillness into History (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2000); Susan Schreibman, Irish Women Poets 19291959:
Some Foremothers, Colby Quarterly 37.4 (December 2001), 30926; Patrick Crotty, The
Irish Renaissance, 18901940: Poetry in English, and Dillon Johnston and Guinn Batten,
Contemporary Poetry in English, 19402000, both in Margaret Kelleher and Philip
OLeary, eds, The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, II: 18902000 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 50112, 357420; Kathy DArcy, Almost Forgotten
Names: Irish Women Poets of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, in Patricia Coughlan and Tina
OToole, eds, Irish Literature: Feminist Perspectives (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2008),
99124; Justin Quinn, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 19002000
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Nicholas Allen, Modernism, Ireland and
Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
31
See: Tom Clyde, Irish Literary Magazines: An Outline History and Descriptive Bibli-
ography (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2003); Frank Shovlin, The Irish Literary Periodical
19231958 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003); Malcolm Ballin, Irish Periodical Culture,
19371972: Genre in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008);
Bryan Fanning, The Quest for Modern Ireland: The Battle for Ideas, 19121986 (Dublin:
Irish Academic Press, 2008); Kelly Matthews, The Bell Magazine and the Representation of
Irish Identity (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012).
Introduction 9
through his work at the BBC and friendship there with Rodgers (his co-
editor on the ill-fated volume). Rodgerss preoccupation with cultural
characterization, as well as the rise of the poet-as-rebel in both Dublin
and London in the early 1950s, as embodied in a gure such as Kavanagh,
are related to MacNeices investment in the notion of the character itself as
some form of response to modernity, coalescing in his Irish-inected
memorialization of Dylan Thomas in Autumn Sequel (1954). Chapter 5
traces MacNeices growing wariness of character and identity in the
second half of the 1950s. He is considered alongside several Irish poets
at this time who alter the prevailing paradigms as regards the relationship
between writer, place, tradition, and people. These central chapters out-
line a persistent discourse of cultural and geographical attachment in Irish
poetry and criticism during this period, which MacNeice repeatedly
challenges.
Framing this middle section are two considerations of MacNeices
relationship with the work of Yeats. This emerges as the meta-narrative
shadowing his engagement with other Irish poets, as well as shaping his
thinking on modern poetry more generally. Chapter 1 focuses on the
period when their careers overlapped, highlighting that Yeats was a con-
temporary as well as a precursor for MacNeice during the 1930s. This shift
in perspective reveals the dynamic nature of their interaction, as both
poets read and reacted to each others work. Their ambivalent critical and
poetical dialogue is shown to move beyond questions of inuence, having
taken place in the context of a decade marked by political turmoil on both
sides of the Irish Sea and, in the literary sphere, vehement debate about
poetrys nature and purpose. Chapter 6 extends previous accounts of the
intertextual presence of Yeatss poetry in MacNeices later work. It argues
that the lyrics in MacNeices last three collections, through a tissue of echo
and allusion, look past the issues of identity that had dogged Yeatss reception
in Irish poetry through the 1940s and 1950s. Rather they nd a mode
through which to confront modernitys cultural, political, and philosophical
challenges by re-engaging with the intellectual complexity and formal
resources of Yeatss work. MacNeices nal collections are shown to redis-
cover Yeatss legacy to Irish poetry as one of thought and song.
Both discussions of this interchange shed new light on MacNeices
relationship with Yeats (as well as offering insights into the work of the
older poet), and seek to expand the terms of critical debate as regards Yeats
and MacNeices importance to modern poetry more generally. Together
with the books central chapters, they outline a network of poetic relations
that underlines the need to rethink MacNeices place in relation to literary
history. The book also contributes to the ongoing work of reassessing what
constitutes that history, particularly in relation to the nature and concerns

of Irish poetry and its surrounding cultures and discourses in the middle of
the twentieth century. Situating MacNeices poetry within its contempor-
aneous Irish contexts goes some way towards understanding how in the
late 1950s in Cape Town, far from even his complicated sense of home,
MacNeice came to be reciting The Rocks of Baun:
Come all you loyal heroes wherever that you be,
Dont hire with any master till you know what your work will be,
For you must rise up early from the clear daylight till dawn,
Im afraid you wont be able for to plough the Rocks of Baun.
My shoes they are well worn now and my stockings they are thin,
My heart is always trembling afeared that Id give in,
My heart is nearly broken from the clear daylight till dawn,
And I never will be able for to plough the rocks of Baun.
My curse attend you, Sweeney, for you have me nearly robbed,

Youre sitting by the reside with your feet upon the hob,
Youre sitting by the reside from the clear daylight till dawn,
But you never will be able for to plough the rocks of Baun.
O rise up, lovely Sweeney, and give your horse its hay,
And give him a good feed of oats before you start away,
Dont feed him on soft turnips, take him down to your green lawn,
And then you might be able for to plough the rocks of Baun.
I wish the Queen of England would write to me in time,

And place me in some regiment all in my youth and prime,
Id ght for Irelands glory from the clear daylight till dawn,
And I never would return again to plough the rocks of Baun.32
32
A New Song on the Rocks of Baun, in Colm O Lochlainn, ed., Irish Street Ballads
(London: Constable, 1939), 201.
1
Yeatss MacNeice
It is easy to forget the extent to which Louis MacNeices career overlapped

with that of W.B. Yeats. By the time the older poet died in January 1939,
MacNeice was coming to the end of ve years of intense publishing
activity. Following his debut volume of poems, Blind Fireworks (1929),
and his unsuccessful novel Roundabout Way (1932), MacNeices rst
mature collection, Poems, was published in 1935. It was soon joined by
his translation of The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1936); a travel miscellany
jointly written with W.H. Auden, Letters from Iceland (1937); the play
Out of the Picture (1937); his travelogue about the Hebrides, I Crossed the
Minch (1938); his critical book Modern Poetry (1938); his impressions of
London Zoo, Zoo (1938); and another collection of poems, The Earth
Compels (1938). That this burst of production coincided with the nal
part of Yeatss career has not always been clear in accounts of Yeatss
inuence on MacNeice. In an aside on the word gay in MacNeices poem
Leaving Barra, Neil Corcoran evokes Yeatss use of the same word in
Lapis Lazuli: That Hamlet and Lear are gay, and that they endure,
may well have been in MacNeices mind when he used the phrase the gay
endurance of women.1 The chronology undermines Corcorans specu-
lation, however, because Leaving Barra was published before Lapis
Lazuli. MacNeices rst poem appeared in The Earth Compels and I
Crossed the Minch in April 1938; while Yeatss poem was rst printed a
month later in New Poems.2 Steven Matthews similarly aligns MacNeices
description of the world as spiteful and gay in Snow with Yeatss
advocacy of gaiety in Lapis Lazuli, arguing that MacNeices delight in
variousness is ultimately a version of that zest which he celebrates, in the
poems of Yeatss old age, towards the end of The Poetry of W.B. Yeats.3
1
Neil Corcoran, The Same Again? Repetition and Refrain in Louis MacNeice, The
Cambridge Quarterly 38.3 (September 2009), 21424: 215.
2
Jon Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 222; John S. Kelly,
A W.B. Yeats Chronology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 309.
3
Steven Matthews, Yeats as Precursor: Readings in Irish, British and American Poetry
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 48.

It is not clear whether Matthews is suggesting that Yeatss gaiety in Lapis
Lazuli acted as a direct inuence on MacNeice (impossible in the case of
Snow, written in 1935) or whether it is pointing to similarities in the two
poets reactions towards historical destruction, which then led MacNeice to
celebrate the zest of Yeatss late poetry in his 1941 study. In either case, the
dynamics of the relationship between the two poets work in the 1930s are
left somewhat obscured; not only did MacNeice read and react to the work
of Yeats, but Yeats read and reacted to the work of MacNeice. That Yeats is
little associated with the 1930s is not only, as Alan Gillis points out, a
serious blip in literary history4 but also an impediment to understanding
MacNeices work and its relationship to Irish poetry.
In his foreword to a reprint of The Poetry of W.B. Yeats, Richard
Ellmann states: If MacNeice felt as an Irishman afnities with Yeats,
Yeats felt them too. He liked or at least rather liked (within the connes
of his own perspective) MacNeices verse, and took an interest in what
the young man was doing.5 Considering that MacNeices rst mature
collection was only published in September 1935, his work features to a
surprising extent in Yeatss critical writing. In a letter to Dorothy Wellesley
that relays T.S. Eliots decision not to publish her poems at Faber, he
explains: They are concentrating on a certain type of poetry. This winter
they are about to bring out a volume by MacNeice, an extreme radical;
your book might interfere.6 Yeatss perception of MacNeice as an
extreme radical was the version of the younger poet he would generally
present. This underlines the manner in which Yeats used criticism to
dene his own shifting identity, but it also points to the complications of
Yeatss inuence and succession within Irish poetry, complications in
which MacNeice, through his poetry and his critical prose, became
embroiled. As mentioned in the Introduction, for Edna Longley MacNeice
emerges as the Irish successor who manages to be involved and detached,
able to receive Yeats dialectically and to develop the Yeatsian dialectic.7
However, Longleys account passes over some of the nuances of the Yeats
MacNeice interaction. She stresses the half-truth of Yeatss qualied praise
of MacNeices work, but misses more hostile responses. As Fran Brearton
4
5
Richard Ellmann, Foreword, in Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (London:
Faber and Faber, 1967), 911: 1011.
6
W.B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, 20 October 1935, in The Collected Letters of
W.B. Yeats (InterLex electronic edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), accession
letter 6403.
7
Edna Longley, It Is Time that I Wrote My Will: Anxieties of Inuence and
Succession, in Warwick Gould and Edna Longley, eds, Yeats Annual 12. That Accusing
Eye: Yeats and his Irish Readers (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 11762: 156.
Yeatss MacNeice 13
suggests, Yeats (in the context of his increasingly embattled position in
relation to Irish culture) attempted to place MacNeice outside of his
construction of Irish poetry.8 Gillis describes how Yeats haunts the work
of younger Irish poets during the 1930s, but simultaneously, his work
reciprocally engages with their aesthetics and concerns, so that his poetic
self-consciously seems to constitute a crazy kind of master-narrative, a book of
books.9 Confronted with Yeats as a present precursor, MacNeice had to
contend with Yeatss ongoing critical and creative interventions. Further-
more, MacNeices part maintenance of effective distance involved more
complex negotiations with Yeatss public voice and reanimation of folk
song than is allowed for by Longleys attempt to align MacNeice with a
disentangling of Yeats from Modernist critical paradigms.10
During 1935, editing The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, Yeats had been
familiarizing himself with contemporary poetry. In an introduction to a
selection of Wellesleys verse, he describes reading many anthologies, skip-
ping all the names I knew, discovering what poetry had been written since
I read everybody, being young.11 MacNeices Train to Dublin, rst
published in Geoffrey Grigsons magazine New Verse in February 1935
and collected in Poems, caught Yeatss attention.12 Through 1935 Yeats had
also been co-editing, with F.R. Higgins, a series of monthly Broadsides
(small pamphlets of verses printed in the style of street ballad sellers with
accompanying tunes and illustrations). At the years end they were gathered
with an introductory essay in which the history of the Anglo-Irish ballad
leads into a consideration of the links between musical tunes and the
composition of contemporary poetry. The relationship between music
and poetry is portrayed as being in danger of alteration, with the opening
lines of Train to Dublin offered as an example of degradation:
There is a possibility that the simple metres based on lines of three and four
accents, eight or six syllables, all that constitute what G.M. Young calls the
fundamental sing-song of the language, come to the poets tongue with
their appropriate tunes; that when a poet has not grown up in a country
civilisation hearing these tunes sung by servants and nurses, his musical sense
8
9
Gillis, Irish Poetry of the 1930s, 34.
10
Edna Longley, Yeats and Modern Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), 15482.
11
W.B. Yeats, Introduction (1935) to Selections from the Poems of Dorothy Wellesley
(1936), repr. in W.B. Yeats, Prefaces and Introductions: Uncollected Prefaces and Introduc-
tions by Yeats to Works by Other Authors and to Anthologies Edited by Yeats, ed. William
H. ODonnell (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 1825: 182.
12
Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems, ed. Peter McDonald (London: Faber and Faber,
2007), 1718.

is changed. Mr Young has suggested that such a change is taking place in
England and America where civilisation grows more and more a town
civilisation. It seems possible, though he does not say so, that the tongue
may lose part of its function which is related to sound, not merely its
sensitiveness to tune but its subconscious memory of a music that ourished
when the Greeks murdered their man. A distinguished poet, who has written
admirably upon other occasions writes:
Our half-thought thoughts divide in sifted wisps
Against the basic facts repatterned without pause,
I can no more gather my mind up in my st . . . .
He may interest the mind, he is describing a journey by rail with some
accuracy, but he does not give pleasure to the tongue.13
Yeats and Higginss criticism implies that here is a poet of the mind
rather than the tongue, of the town rather than the country, a product of
urban England and America rather than rural Ireland, where the ballad
tradition has kept poetry close to the condition of song. As will be
discussed, the relationship between poetry and folk song carries considerable
weight in an Irish context. It seems here to be designating what it is to be an
Irish poet at all. But MacNeices poems title and his name, undisclosed by
Yeats and Higgins, somewhat complicate their set of oppositions; the poem
is not merely a performance in sound but a performance about sound, not
merely a poem set in Ireland but a poem about Irish poetry.
Yeatss attempt to locate Train to Dublin beyond Irelands shores,
among the radical poetry arising from town civilisation, may stem from
the challenge it poses to his poetics. Yeats seemingly appears in the poem,
when the inability of the speaker to gather up my mind in my st is
compared with the more ordered composition practices of an addressee:
In a Georgian house you turn at the carpets edge | Turning a sentence.
As well as resonating with an eighteenth-century sense of literary decorum,
this you resembles the Yeats who lived in a grand Georgian townhouse in
Dublins Merrion Square during the 1920s, the Yeats whom Lady Greg-
ory described pacing up and down Cooles paths when composing verse,
the Yeats for whom metrical composition was a tortuously slow process:
nothing is done upon the rst day, not one rhyme in its place.14 This
suggestion of a Yeats-like addressee continues when the speaker asserts
13
F.R. Higgins and W.B. Yeats, Anglo-Irish Ballads, in W.B. Yeats, F.R. Higgins, and
(musical) Arthur Duff, eds, Broadsides: A Collection of Old and New Songs (Dublin: Cuala
Press, 1935), repr. in Yeats, Prefaces and Introductions, 17581: 1801.
14
R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, II: The Arch-Poet, 19151939 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 210; Lady Gregory, Coole (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1931), 45;
W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies, ed. Williams H. ODonnell and Douglas N. Archibald
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 171.
Yeatss MacNeice 15
that I give you the faces, not the permanent masks. This echoes Yeatss
doctrine of the mask, outlined in Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917), which
describes the way in which there is something willed in the personality
taken on by the hero, the saint, and the poet. MacNeices 1935 essay
Poetry To-day alludes to the doctrine, acknowledging the imaginative
potential that the Literary Revival had created in Ireland: We now laugh
at the Celtic Twilight and at the self-importance of these dilettante
nationalists, but their navet and affectation had manured the ground
for poetry. Where it is possible to be a hypocrite, it is also possible to be a
hero, a saint, or an artist.15 In Train to Dublin, though, the speaker is
unable to give the addressee something heroic or saintly to venerate. Faces
are only faces; locations and landscapes are offered just as passing inci-
dental things, rather than as the stage sets for heroic or saintly drama. The
nal lines concede the possibility of further syntheses to which people,
including this you, might attain and nd that they are rich and breathing
gold, bringing Yeatss wish for transformation into a singing gold bird in
Sailing to Byzantium into play.16 The poem, though, cannot offer such a
transformation either. This acknowledges that MacNeice and his gener-
ation cannot ascribe to Yeatss idealism, but also hints at concern about
the desirability of so giving an idol or idea, creed or Kingrather
ominous gifts in the political landscape of the 1930s.
If Yeats is addressed in Train to Dublin, then his use of poetic form
and sound are also at issue. The Yeats-like gure crafting verse according
to the rhythms of his steps, regulated by the dimensions of his Georgian
house, is juxtaposed with the sound world of a moving train, a shell | Held
hollow to the ear, the mere | Reiteration of integers. Stability is opposed to
ux, the past to the modern and the made to the imposed, as the sentence
turned by the addressee is placed against the trains relentless, querulous
rhythm. A contrast between Yeatss control and MacNeices inability to
gather his thoughts is reected in the poems formal performance. Its ve-
line stanzas have few direct parallels in Yeatss work, but one is with the
fth section of Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.17 Helen Vendler
describes this poems peculiar form as looking like a type of ballad with
its abab rhyme scheme plus an extra line, forming a nal couplet, which
15
Louis MacNeice, Poetry To-Day (1935), in Geoffrey Grigson, ed., The Arts To-Day
(London: John Lane, 1935), repr. in Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan
Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 1044: 15.
16
W.B. Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and
Russell K. Alspach (London: Macmillan, 1957), 4078.
17
Ibid., 432.

she reads as undoing what the rst four lines have established.18 At times,
Train to Dublin seems to replicate this abab form, such as in the rst
stanza, which ends with an emphatic, Yeatsian, use of cadence: This is the
way that animals lives pass; Yeats-like, the stanzas, with one exception,
are also all end-stopped. But MacNeices poem diverges from any sense of
balance and nish; the rhymes and rhythms do not settle down into a
pattern, remaining skittishly irregular to enact, at best, a ramshackle re-run
of the grand Yeatsian manner, hastily constructed as the train goes on. As
Terence Brown articulates in relation to MacNeices embrace of an array
of machine-age vehicles such as trains, cars, buses, and boats, travel
functions not only as an experience to be registered but also as a mode
of composition.19 This stands in contrast to Yeatss disinclination to
include the mechanical in his poetry.20
MacNeices description of a shell also reworks Yeatss early poems The
Song of the Happy Shepherd and The Sad Shepherd.21 For the happy
shepherd, an echo-harbouring shell provides relief from a world of Grey
Truth: to its lips thy story tell, | And they thy comforters will be, |
Rewording in melodious guile | Thy fretful words a little while. This
symbolism afrms poetry in opposition to fact. The act of creation
becomes comforting through being an act of reception, as the poet
empowers himself by drawing on poetic tradition: The seashells ear is
its mouth; it hears with its organ of discourse, the way a new poem speaks
its rewordings with the same organ of writing by which it hears earlier
poems.22 In The Sad Shepherd, contrastingly, when the shepherd nds a
shell no comforting transformation occurs: the sad dweller by the sea-
ways lone | Changed all he sang to inarticulate moan | Among her
wildering whirls, forgetting him.23 The poet through sorrow is disem-
powered and nature becomes indifferent, producing and listening to its
own sounds. In Train to Dublin, MacNeices rewording of Yeatss image
extends this sense of weakness. There is no echo at all, rather the shell is
18
Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2007), 74.
19
Terence Brown, What am I Doing Here?: Travel and MacNeice, in Fran Brearton
and Edna Longley, eds, Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his Legacy (Manchester:
Carcanet Press, 2012), 7284: 74.
20
MacNeice later remarked of Beautiful Lofty Things, published in 1938, that Yeats
was now able to mention trains and exalt them into mythology: The Poetry of W.B. Yeats
(London: Oxford University Press, 1941), 173. See also Longley, Yeats and Modern Poetry,
1701.
21
Variorum Yeats, 649.
22
John Hollander, Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1988), 59.
23
Yeatss MacNeice 17
held to the ear, imposing its own sound. Moreover, this is not natures
inarticulate moan but the sound of the train as an apprehension of the
inexorable ow of time and the horizon of death: the bell | That tolls and
tolls. The poets power is not only ignored by nature but overridden by a
mechanistic world.
For all MacNeices British leftist credentials, Train to Dublin thinks
through the kind of poetry it might be possible for him to write in and of
Ireland. The signicance of Yeats and Higginss categorizing of MacNeice
in Anglo-Irish Ballads as the producer of an urban poetry uninformed by
the pleasure of sound broadens. MacNeice implies that a particular strand
of Yeatss poetrythe idealist stabilization of ux through form and
symbolis not possible, even when in Ireland. Yeats and Higgins offer
an alternative diagnosis: MacNeice has not grown up in a country
civilisation so his poetry necessarily exists at a remove from Irish poetry.
Problematically, MacNeices upbringing was in Ireland, though not quite
in a country civilisation. To draw on the terms of Andrew Thackers
account of the critical literary geography of modernism (based on the
theories of Heidegger and Michel de Certeau), the speaker of Train to
Dublin encounters Ireland as a space, indicating a sense of movement,
of history, of becoming, which is subject to economic and technological
change. This is signalled by the poets own placement on a moving train;
the poem re-evaluates the resources left open to poetry as a result. For
Yeats and Higgins, Irish poetry arises through the experience of Ireland as
a place, implying a static sense of location, of being, or of dwelling, at
some remove from the pressures of the age and, therefore, the repository
for an alternative, traditional culture.24 At stake within this interchange
over poetic sound and its proximity to song is the very nature of the poet
and Irelands relationship to modernity.
The circumstances of the composition of Train to Dublin in September
October 1934 further suggest that a confrontation is being played out
between MacNeice and Yeats in the poem and its subsequent reception.
MacNeices mentor, the classicist E.R. Dodds, was staying in Dublin at
the time, collecting reminiscences for a memoir of Stephen MacKenna,
the translator of Plotinus who had recently died.25 On 16 September,
MacNeice wrote, contemplating a visit: If (a) I could get a cheap ticket & (b)
you were still there, & (c) there was a chance of meeting Lennox Robinson
or other interesting & useful Worthies, I might to try to get over to
24
Andrew Thacker, Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 13.
25
Stephen MacKenna, Journal and Letters of Stephen MacKenna, ed. with a memoir by
E.R. Dodds, preface by Padraic Colum (London: Constable, 1936).

Dublin next weekend.26 Nine days later he was there and being intro-
duced to Yeats, as he recalls in his posthumously published memoir The
Strings are False (1965, written c.19401941):
Dodds and I went for tea with W.B. Yeats in Rathfarnham. Yeats in spite of
his paunch was elegant in a smooth light suit and a just sufciently crooked
bow tie. His manner was hierophantic, even when he said: This afternoon
I have been playing croquet with my daughter. We were hoping he would
talk poetry and gossip, but knowing that Dodds was a professor of Greek he
conned the conversation to spiritualism and the phases of the moon,
retailing much that he had already printed. Burnet, Yeats said, was all
wrong; the Ionian physicists had of course not been physicists at all. The
Ionian physicists were spiritualists.
He talked a great deal about the spirits to whom his wife, being a medium,
had introduced him. Have you ever seen them? Dodds asked (Dodds could
never keep back such questions). Yeats was a little piqued. No, he said
grudgingly, he had never actually seen them . . . butwith a ash of
triumphhe had often smelt them.27
The comic tone of this anecdote should not obscure the extent to which
MacNeice viewed Yeats as an important precursor, whose achievements
were not to be taken lightly.
MacNeice later recalled reading and rereading Yeatss Land of Hearts
Desire and also some of his early lyrics as a seventeen-year-old on holiday
in Donegal.28 Yeats pervades MacNeices juvenilia, such as his rst
published poem, Death of a Prominent Businessman, a skit on Yeatss
The Stolen Child and The Ballad of a Foxhunter in which the soul of a
businessman is taken away to a black peat bog by the wee folk.29 This
interest continued in MacNeices early career. In 1934, MacNeice asked
Grigson if he could review Yeatss recent Collected Poems.30 Whether or
not Grigson responded is unclear, but MacNeice did later write Some
26
Louis MacNeice to E.R. Dodds, 16 September [1934], Bodleian Library, MS Eng.
Lett. c. 465/14.
27
Kelly, Yeats Chronology, 289; Louis MacNeice, The Strings are False: An Unnished
Autobiography (1965; London: Faber and Faber, 1982), 1478.
28
Ibid., 227. At school he copied Yeatss The Happy Townland into a notebook: Louis
MacNeice, copy in handwriting of MacNeice of The Happy Townland by W.B. Yeats,
later identied by him as having been written at school, Harry Ransom Center (MacNeice,
L), Misc., Hanley II.
29
Neil Jones, Remaking It New: The Reorientation of Modernist Poetics in the Early
Poetry of Louis MacNeice, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2006, 437; Louis
MacNeice, Death of a Prominent Businessman, Malburian 59.855 (23 October 1924),
repr. in MacNeice, Collected Poems, 654; Variorum Yeats, 868, 979.
30
Louis MacNeice to Geoffrey Grigson, 24 January [1934], New York Public Library,
Berg Collection, MacNeice Papers, 77B0363.
Yeatss MacNeice 19
Notes on Mr. Yeatss Plays for New Verse.31 In a notebook started that the
same year, MacNeice made a list of poems for a private anthology.32 It
included four poems by Auden, three by Spender, one by Clere Parsons,
two by Dodds, two by himself, and fourteen poems by Yeats, pointing
forwards to the opening chapter of The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1941): If
I were making a general anthology of shorter English poems, I should
want to include some sixty by W.B. Yeats.33
Of the 1934 trip to Dublin, Stallworthy speculates that MacNeice took
the ferry to Belfast and saw his father and stepmother before heading south
by train; a journey that prompted his poem Train to Dublin.34 This is
supported by an earlier draft of the poem, dated September 1934.35 In this
version there is no Yeats-like addressee and there are fewer Yeatsian
allusions. For instance, there is no opposition between faces and per-
manent masks, or mention of not becoming rich and breathing gold.
The poem does not yet clearly form part of an intertextual dialogue with
Yeats. This suggests that MacNeices meeting with Yeats occurred after his
rst draft, prompting him to rewrite the poem. In the course of revising it,
MacNeice reimagined the poem as a confrontation with Yeats. In the
earlier draft, moreover, there is not the same attempt to represent all of
Ireland as a series of passing incidental things; only Dublin is described
when the speaker gets off the train and then takes a taxi. Robyn Marsack
comments: Dublin and Ireland provide some surface to clutch, not in
themselves important in the draft version of the poem, but treated with
affectionate specicity in the nal text.36 In the context of this turning of
the poem towards Yeats, specicity about Ireland might be read as a
gesture against the older poets use of the country as the scene of myth
and heroism, and as an attempt to imagine an Irish poetry more open to
the exterior passing impressions of a modern world that includes Ireland.
MacNeices meeting with the older poet and drafting of Train to
Dublin came at the end of a summer of ambivalent poetic engagement
with Yeatss work. Eclogue by a Five-Barred Gate, written in May 1934,
31
Louis MacNeice, Some Notes on Mr. Yeatss Plays, New Verse 18 (December 1935),
79.
32
Louis MacNeice, black and green notebook [19341936], Bodleian Library, Mac-
Neice Papers, box 30.
33
The poems listed are: Running to Paradise, The Peacock, A Memory of Youth,
The Magi, The Collar-Bone of a Hair, The Dawn, A Deep-Sworn Vow, Solomon and
the Witch, Sailing to Byzantium, Blood and the Moon, A Dialogue of Self and Soul,
Byzantium, Three Things, I am of Ireland. MacNeice, Poetry of W.B. Yeats, 1.
34
35
MacNeice, black and green notebook [19341936].
36
Robyn Marsack, The Cave of Making: The Poetry of Louis MacNeice (Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 1982), 8.

seems to draw strength from Yeatss example. A meta-poetic, uncanny
pastoral, it opens with two poet-shepherds of the Theocritean breed
coming across the gure of Death, who then makes a clear allusion to
Yeatss refrain in Easter 1916: All you do is burke the other and terrible
beauty.37 Rebuking the shepherds for neglecting their responsibility to
quote the prices | Of signicant living and decent dying, Death asserts
that poetry is not only the surface vanity, the curer sitting by the
wayside, or the bridging of two-banked rivers.38 This forms a negative
impression of poetry. The surface vanity seems to represent the poetry of
prevailing taste: The painted nails, the hips narrowed by fashion. The
other targets seem more specically to be the poets promoted in Mac-
Neices critical prose, such as Auden and Spender. Peter McDonald nds
in curer a possible allusion to Audens insistence in the early 1930s on
the therapeutic role of the artist as healer or Truly Strong Man; while
Death, in suggesting the idea of a river without a further bank, is
undermining the concept of poetry as purely referential, a means of direct
and unequivocal communication which would be, in Stephen Spenders
phrase, complementary to action.39
Yeatss confrontation of the other and terrible beauty, in contrast,
becomes part of Deaths alternative manifesto: a poetry that does not offer
escapism, which is of the Here and Now, and yet is beyond the merely
communicative. Death engineers its performance in a singing match: Sing
me, each in turn, what dreams you had last night. In recounting their
dreams, a keyword within Yeatss oeuvre, the shepherds confront some-
thing disconcertingly beyond the phenomenal. The rst shepherd is
confronted by a face swinging on the neck of a snake. | And that face
I knew to be God, which on second thoughts bears a resemblance to the
stranger he is talking to, namely Death. The second shepherd is blind and
carried to a sexual encounter with a woman. When she leaves, he sees a
platonic vision of the sky full of ladders and angels ascending and
descending, echoing Gods appearance to Jacob when he had ed from
his brother Esau.40 As McDonald argues, in both dreams the shepherds
confront the other in formless and uncontrollable ways that undermine
their own stable, self-justifying art.41 Informing Deaths struggle to pull
the shepherds away from self-regarding mannerisms, Yeats is an intertext-
ual presence whose work paradoxically rings true despite its investment
37 38
MacNeice, Collected Poems, 3914. Ibid., 1014.
39
Peter McDonald, Louis MacNeice: The Poet in his Contexts (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1991), 22.
40 41
Genesis 28:12. McDonald, Louis MacNeice, 23.
Yeatss MacNeice 21
in the irrational; it is a visionary poetry that lays the rails level on the
sleepers | To carry the powerful train of abstruse thought.
Ode is another complex engagement with Yeats. Also written in May
1934, it responds to the birth of MacNeices son.42 As others have
observed, it stands in dialogue with Yeatss A Prayer for my Daughter.43
Both poems open with a speaker who meditates alone at night, opposed to
the violence of the weather, drawing up a prayer for his child. However,
whereas Yeatss persona stands before actual nature, the storm howling
and the wind bred on the Atlantic, MacNeices is at a remove: his night is
coarse with chocolate, as the wind blows in from Bournville (Cadburys
Birmingham factory), and the speaker hankers after the Atlantic | With a
frivolous nostalgia. The opening of Ode seems to be working itself away
from Yeatss poem (in contrast to the way in which the Eclogue drew
closer), undermining the Romantic methods of consolation to be found
there. An ancestor of both poems is, as Brown notes, the conversation-
poetry of Coleridge, but where Coleridge and Yeats created Romantic
settings for their conversation-poem meditations in serious, solemn, quiet-
toned poetry, MacNeice in rather mannered, slick verse creates an anti-
Romantic setting for his largely similar meditation.44 In A Prayer for my
Daughter, the speaker is initially in great gloom, imagining the arrival of
violent future years dancing to a frenzied drum, but is able to turn from
such thoughts and request that his daughter be granted a life lived
according to custom and ceremony. MacNeice at rst seems to follow
a similar path. Praying for a rather Ireland-like island, drugged with a
slogan, chewing the old lie | That parallel lines will meet at innity, he
asks for his son to have more limited, balanced, and homely perspectives:
let his Absolute | Like any four-walled house be put up decently. As in
Yeatss poem, which notoriously asks for his daughter to be granted not
too much beauty, there is an emphasis on limitation.
For MacNeices speaker such balance is eeting. The apprehension of
the worlds variety, the blessedness of fact, starts to undermine the
deployment of Romantic symbolism. The organic images in A Prayer
for my Daughter, visualizing the daughter as a ourishing hidden tree
whose thoughts may like the linnet be [ . . . ] dispensing [ . . . ] magnani-
mities of sound, control and legitimate the emphasis placed on courtesy,
custom, and ceremony. MacNeices natural descriptions prove less
42
MacNeice, Collected Poems, 327; Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice, 158.
43
Variorum Yeats, 4036. See: Terence Brown, Louis MacNeice: Sceptical Vision (Dublin:
Gill and Macmillan, 1975), 389; Edna Longley, Louis MacNeice: A Critical Study (London:
Faber and Faber, 1988), 21; McDonald, Louis MacNeice, 312, 224.
44
Brown, Louis MacNeice, 39.

stabilizing. Trees themselves are subject to change, suddenly shifting from
being in bud to becoming a sea of leaves: a wealthy wave and a tidal tower
of green; they are also disconcertingly various, leading to sensory and
linguistic overload: Coral azalea and scarlet rhododendron | Syringa and
pink horse-chestnut and laburnum. The ux of lived experience, as
McDonald describes, undermines the construction of an islanded, and
isolated, identity.45 Turning from these trees to composing the self, the
speaker can only hand on more personal and portentous symbols. Among
a list of unanalysed scent and noise, the remembered hypnotism of an
aeroplane in June becomes an ominous augury of future war: When
these tiny ies like nibs will calmly draw our death | A dipping gradient on
the graph of Europe. There is an ironic distance between the sound of a
linnet in Yeatss poem and the sounds impinging on MacNeices speaker.
The violence these sounds point to is nightmarishly visualized in the
description of a town-dweller who was innocent and integral once
hanging on a telephone wire by the heels gut-open. The very efcacy
of Yeatss appeal to innocence and integrity is questioned.
Much of this reversal of Yeats is performed through a lack of control,
whether of symbolism, as above, or of form and tone. This is similar to
Train to Dublin, though this lack is more overtly foregrounded in Ode
by the generic formality towards which the poems title gestures. In A
Prayer for my Daughter the speakers consolations are effected, in part,
through form, tone, and mode. The turbulent weather and apocalyptic
future of the opening stanzas is followed by the serene arrival at prayer in
the third stanza:
May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a strangers eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufcient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never nd a friend.
The rhymes regulate mood and sense. The half-rhyme, not/distraught,
aids the shift in tone, while the chiasmic rhyme scheme associates nding
a friend with being a sufcient end, further qualifying beauty. In
contrast, MacNeices poem never settles. Its stanzas uctuate in length
and do not form a pattern. At times the verse tightens up, such as when
the poet is trying to determine a creed to bestow on his son, with the
45
McDonald, Louis MacNeice, 32.
Yeatss MacNeice 23
rhetorical repetitions of let him, let not, and may he allied to a short
line length. Yet control soon tips into the glib, May he hit the golden
mean | Which contains the seasonal extreme, and then dissipates.
A wariness of form is emphasized in the penultimate stanza. The line
tightens ironically as the speaker asserts I cannot draw up any code. He
then relapses into nding a symbolic consolation in wishing to dream of
both real and unreal | Breakers of the ocean. The stanzas more ordered,
incantatory form almost leads the way back towards this search for an
adequate and consoling symbol, but a further shift comes with its nal
line: I must put away this drug. The poem then ends with the yellow
waves roaring, undercutting the wished-for discovery of home and
peace. Ode exposes the Romantic methods and ideology used by
Yeats to conjure a moment of prayer and imagine for his daughter a
unity of culture and being.
These three poems written in 1934, Train to Dublin, Eclogue by a
Five-Barred Gate, and Ode, offer a sustained reaction to Yeatss work, a
conicted, paradoxical mixture of amusement, admiration, intimacy,
hostility, dissatisfaction, and detachment. At issue is the poets relation
to modernity, as well as more tangentially the inclusion of Ireland and the
Irish poet within modernity. The poems move away from Yeats in seeking
a poetry that does not falsify the poets experience of the world, yet also
move towards Yeats in seeking a poetry that rings true. Certain principles
emerge though: that truth is not necessarily best grasped through realism,
that time and experience are not to be wished away, and that death as a
limit on life confers value and signicance on things beyond their utility.
There also stands the sheer extent of MacNeices interest in Yeats at this
early point in his career. For all that critics have recognized the correlation
between Ode and A Prayer for my Daughter, a sense of Yeats as a
presence in MacNeices early work has not been grasped. Critical emphasis
has been placed on MacNeices engagement with Yeats at the beginning of
the Second World War. Longley comments that MacNeice needed to
write The Poetry of W.B. Yeats to get Yeats into perspective, and it also
took the atmosphere of autumn 1939.46 Brown writes of MacNeices
confrontation with Yeats during the early years of the war, and the crisis
of faith that Yeats and the war provoked.47 While it is certainly true that
46
Longley, Louis MacNeice, 99.
47
Terence Brown, Louis MacNeice and the Second World War, in Kathleen Devine,
ed., Modern Irish Writers and the Wars (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1999), 16577:
16971. See also Richard Danson Brown, Neutrality and Commitment: MacNeice, Yeats,
Ireland and the Second World War, Journal of Modern Literature 28.3 (2005), 10929: 111.

MacNeices attitude towards Yeats developed over time, this should not
obscure Yeatss presence in MacNeices imagination earlier in the decade.
* * *
MacNeices extensive engagement with Yeats in 1934 complicates Patricia
Coughlan and Alex Daviss sense that the younger poet falls outside of
their redrawing of the boundaries of Irish poetry in the 1930s because his
career was largely conducted within English cultural problematics.48 That
MacNeice was responding to contemporary Ireland at this time is further
suggested by his other work. In February 1933, MacNeice told Anthony
Blunt that he was writing a play for the people in Dublin.49 He hoped that
the play, titled Station Bell and nished in September 1934, might interest
the Gate or the Abbey (hence the mention in the letter to Dodds of Lennox
Robinson, then the Abbeys manager).50 Set in the buffet of a Dublin
station, the play is a depiction of an Ireland turned fascist and attempts to
satirize various political and religious targets. The main protagonist, Julia
Browna cross between a militia leader and Kathleen ni Houlihan
declares herself dictator of Ireland, having survived an attempt to kill her
by an incompetent Catholic-turned-communist terrorist. A complex bomb
plot unfolds, which Julia plans and foils, centred around the secret that her
Irish Seaweed Company has actually been selling arms. Seemingly owing
something to Denis Johnstons The Moon in the Yellow River (1932), the
play is a response to the frenzied and paranoid atmosphere of the Irish
political present.51 February 1932 had seen the election of Eamon de
Valeras Fianna Fil, with the support of Labour; following another election
in January 1933, Fianna Fil formed a single-party government. MacNeice
speculated to Blunt that his play wouldnt be allowed in the [Irish Free
State] as De Val. wld take it personally.52 It also satirizes the rise of Eoin
48
Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis, eds, Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the
1930s (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), 11. Part of Coughlan and Daviss point
presumably is that MacNeices role in British culture means that he is not in need of the
same kind of retrieval from obscurity as Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin,
and Blanaid Salkeld.
49
Louis MacNeice to Anthony Blunt, 6 February 1933, qtd in Stallworthy, Louis
MacNeice, 164.
50
Replying to the rejection of Station Bell by Rupert Doone of the Group Theatre, who
would later stage the translation of The Agamemnon and Out of the Picture, MacNeice
discusses sending it to the Gate or the Abbey: Louis MacNeice to Rupert Doone, 22 July
[1934], New York Public Library, Berg Collection, 72B4960. The play was nally
produced in 1936 by the Birmingham University Drama Society.
51
Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland: 19002000 (London: Prole
Books, 2004), 416.
52
Louis MacNeice to Anthony Blunt, 8 June 1934, in Letters of Louis MacNeice, ed.
Jonathan Allison (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 2413.
Yeatss MacNeice 25
ODuffy, who in February 1933, when police commissioner, was rumoured
to have suggested a coup dtat to stop Fianna Fil coming to power. Having
been dismissed by de Valera, that July he became leader of the Army
Comrades Association, the Blueshirts, a pro-Treaty organization of army
veterans that in outward appearance, with their militaristic uniforms and
distinctive salute, resembled European fascist movements.53
Stallworthy comments that Station Bell is a satiric variation on the
theme of the poem Valediction in attacking Ireland on so many fronts.54
Like the play, the poem responds to political developments. Written in
January 1934 and entitled Eclogue on Ireland in a notebook draft, it was
rst published in four verse paragraphs, bringing to the surface four
distinct movements within the poems protracted ritual of exorcism.55
Its rst section opens with the repetition of Their verdure dare not show,
from the second verse of the nationalist song The Wearing of the Green:
When law can stop the blades of grass from growing as they grow,
And when the leaves in summer-time their verdure dare not show,
Then I will change the colour that I wear in my caubeen,
But till that day, please God, Ill stick to wearing of the green.56
The song evokes a period where Irish nationalism was suppressed by the
British. In quoting a fragment in altered circumstances, after partition,
independence, and civil war, the poem implies that the conditions for
nationalism and its articulation, for sticking to and singing of the wearing
of the green, have changed. The unquoted next verse of the song, which
proposes leaving Ireland and travelling to America, ironically informs the
poem of departure that follows, suggesting that the impetus to leave
remains, despite the new political dispensation. These opening echoes of
suppression and ight lead into a sequence of confusing, violent images
that, as McDonald points out, blur the lines somewhere between meta-
phor and simile, with a subject that is itself indeterminate.57 Drawing on
the ScottishIrish myth of the selkie, which can shift from seal to human
form, the poem describes seals oating between islands, sleek and black
53
See Mike Cronin, The Blueshirts and Irish Politics (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997).
54
Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice, 165; MacNeice, Collected Poems, 710.
55
Louis MacNeice, red notebook [19301934], Bodleian Library, MacNeice Papers,
Box 30; Louis MacNeice, Valediction: An Eclogue, Life and Letters 10.54 (June 1934),
3524; Peter McDonald, Louis MacNeice: The Poet in his Contexts (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1991), 25.
56
Dion Boucicault, The Wearing of the Green, repr. in Seamus Deane et al., eds, The
Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 3 vols (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991), II,
1089.
57

and irrelevant, unable to depose logically what they want.58 The oblique
grammar and symbolism, redolent of kinship, dehumanization, and
ongoing violence without clear aim, suggests the aftermath of civil war.
This becomes clearer as the culling of seals and the killing of men are
entangled in the depiction of one of these creatures shot under borrowed
pennons, slung like a dead seal in a boghole, and beaten up | By peasants
with long lipspresumably the very people for whom this seal-human
was meant to be ghting, ironically gured in the terms in which nation-
alism had sought to identify the physiology of the Irish face.59 At the end
of the opening section, this combination of nationalism and confused
violence comes into focus as the product of a past that is still all too alive:
Park your car in the city of Dublin, see Sackville Street
Without the sandbags in the old photos, meet
The statues of the patriots, history never dies,
At any rate in Ireland, arson and murder are legacies
Like old rings hollow-eyed without their stones
Dumb talismans.
A degree of grammatical confusion is maintained. The nal lines dumb
talismans, playing on both senses of the word dumb, might refer to
arson and murder or point back to the statues of patriots; the violent
legacies of the past are still, stupidly and inarticulately, present, but the
patriots who are now only silent statues are also unable to adorn such
violence through their rhetoric. Resonating with the unruly politics of the
early 1930s, history is present but its reasons, and reason, are not. The
opening remnant of The Wearing of the Green is itself an enduring
legacy of the heroic past. Its relevance should have passed in a now
independent Ireland. But the pressures of the songs nationalist impera-
tives still apply, while its narration of ight from an oppressive Ireland
casts an ironic shadow across the present.
The middle two sections of Valediction explore the poets relationship
with Ireland as a product of a past he cannot deny, pitched between the
sentimentality of the tourist, Climb the cliff in the postcard, and the
danger of staying and paying for the trick beauty of a prism | In drug-dull
58
MacNeice later reviewed David Thompsons book on the myth, The People of the Sea
(1954): London Magazine 1.9 (Oct. 1954), repr. in Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, ed.
Alan Heuser (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990), 198200.
59
John Brannigan, Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2009), 78143. MacNeices interest in the racial characteristics of faces
recurs in I Crossed the Minch: [The Hebrideans] facial expression is more pleasing than that
of the Lowland Scot but, like most Scots, their features are raw and imperfect. Louis
MacNeice, I Crossed the Minch, intr. Tom Herron (1938; Edinburgh: Polygon, 2007), 12.
Yeatss MacNeice 27
fatalism. The speakers response is an attempt to exorcise his blood and
merely look on at each new fantasy of badge and gun. In the nal section,
this becomes a matter of rejecting certain poetic responsibilities. The
speaker abandons the changing Irish sky, described in a parody of roman-
ticization: the mist is blanket-thick, the sun quilts the valley, the
winging shadows of clouds pass over the long hills like a ddles phrase.
He is not only turning his back on Ireland but also on the obligation to be
poetic about it. Contrasted against this is a desire to offer justice and
enlightenment by bounding across Ireland like a dog of sunlight to pick
up the scent of a hundred fugitives | That have broken the mesh of
ordinary lives (possibly a reference to ongoing political violence). As he is
merely ordinary, the speaker laments that he cannot remain in Ireland
without becoming entrapped in displays of identity and allegiance:
I have to observe milestone and curio
The beaten buried gold of an old kings bravado,
Falsetto antiquities, I have to gesture,
Take part in, or renounce, each imposture[.]
This prompts the speaker to resign, a word-choice that implies that what
is being disavowed here is not just a country but a vocation. Echoing
Yeatss hurling of helmets, crowns, and swords into the pit in Recon-
ciliation, MacNeice diagnoses and rejects something of what is expected
of the Irish poet: memorialization, the singing of antiquarian interest, and
a willingness to take dramatically to the public stage.60
The hazards of Yeatss continuing sense of vocation were underlined, in
ways that resonate with Station Bell and Valediction, when he published in
1934 Three Marching Songs he had written for the Blueshirts. In a prefatory
note, he explains that the songs were a response to his perception that
our growing disorder, the fanaticism that inamed it like some old bullet
imbedded in the esh, was about to turn our noble history into an ignoble
farce. For the rst time in my life I wanted to write what some crowd in the
street might understand and sing; I asked my friends for a tune; they
recommended that old march ODonnell Abu.61
This reaction is similar to that rejected in Valediction. With the use of
our, presenting himself as a part of the Irish people, and then attempting
to write songs for some crowd, Yeats is attempting to gesture | Take part
in, or renounce, each imposture. Whereas Valediction resigns from the
60
61
W.B. Yeats, Three Marching Songs, The Spectator (23 February 1934), repr. in

poets position within cultural nationalism, Yeats reiterates a sense of
poetrys power within the national sphere, though now reoriented towards
authoritarian ends. Yet there are strains within this justicatory note; as
R.F. Foster comments, it acts as a kind of disclaimer, suggesting Yeatss
unease by the time of publication.62 Having outlined his rancour against
those threatening public order, Yeats describes the songs as arising from a
passion that laid hold upon him with the violence which unts the poet
for all politics but his own. Quite what the distance is between his violent
refrain, Down the fanatic, down the clown, | Down, down, hammer them
down, and the fanaticism the songs are trying to restrain is unclear: his
poets passion seems to risk furthering disorder.63 Moreover, his explan-
ation admits that the songs were something of a failure as they were not
taken by the Blueshirts:
I read my songs to friends, they talked to others, those others talked, and now
companies march to the words Blueshirt Abu, and a song that is all about
shamrocks and harps or seems all about them, because its words have the
particular variation upon the cadence of Yankee Doodle Young Ireland reserved
for that theme. I did not write that song; I could not if I tried. Here are my songs.
Anybody may sing them, choosing clown and fanatic for himself, if they are
singablemusicians say they are, but may atterand worth singing.64
Offered in disappointment to an audience outside of Ireland in the pages of
The Spectator, the songs are a telling instance of the difculties of Yeatss
continuing sense of his role as a public poet within Ireland during the 1930s.
As seen in Yeats and Higginss response to Train to Dublin, and in the
allusion to The Wearing of the Green in Valediction, poetrys relation-
ship to song is a recurrent concern in the interaction between Yeats and
MacNeice. A key backdrop to this is the prominent role played by song in
formations of Irish identity. In the context of the possible reignition of
civil war hostilities, Yeatss hope that Three Marching Songs will act as a
call to order can be read as an attempt to reorientate pre-revolutionary
investment in the politically galvanizing potential of song. This is gestured
towards by his admission that a song of the 1840s Young Ireland
movement offers the tting cadence he fails to write. David Fitzpatrick
also suggests that Yeatss refrain of down, down derives from versions of
62
Foster, W.B. Yeats, II, 4779.
63
Variorum Yeats, 544. As originally printed all three songs have this chorus. Subse-
quently Yeats provided different choruses for the second and third songs. In keeping with
his poetrys increasingly rebarbative strain, these move towards a more general sense of
malevolent destructiveness, leaving behind the hope for order anywhere: Drown all the
dogs, said the erce young woman, | They killed my goose and a cat. | Drown, drown in the
water-butt, | Drown all the dogs, said the erce young woman (Variorum Yeats, 546).
64
Ibid., 5434.
Yeatss MacNeice 29
the Orange ballad Croppies Lie Down: Derry down, down, rebels lie
down. | Down, down, croppies lie down. Fitzpatrick sees the rst of
Yeatss songs as incongruously grafting 1798 nationalist verses on to this
1798 loyalist chorus.65 Yet what Yeats is overtly trying to do in these songs
is control the forces of rebellion and reaction unleashed in the late
eighteenth century through the popular song tradition. Sequentially they
move from a rebellious Grandfather singing under the gallows that a
strong cause and blows are a delight, answered in each chorus by its
reactionary counterpart, towards the pride and delight to be found in
loyalty in the third song: Soldiers take pride in saluting their Captain, |
The devotee proffers a knee to his Lord. Yeatss prefatory note traces such
submissive sentiments to a Gaelic poets lament for his lost masters,
linking them with a distinctly conservative earlier Irish tradition.66
Yeatss attempts to use song bring into play a set of overlapping
questions about what it is to be an Irish poet at all. Music has often
been seen as the pre-eminent symbol of Irish culture and has been put to
political use through its literary appropriation.67 Song has had a particu-
larly prominent role in conceptions of modern Irish poetry: Bernard
ODonoghue notes that it is characteristic of most anthologies of Irish
poetry, in Irish, English or both, to give far greater representation of
poetry in the oral tradition and popular songs ( Tuamas amhrin na
ndaoine or songs of the people) than in most canonical assemblages.68
Allied to this prominence has also been songs function (whether operat-
ing in practice or symbolically) as a tool for identication and analysis
65
David Fitzpatrick, The Gardener and the Stable-Boy: Yeats, MacNeice, and the
Problems of Orangeism, The Review of English Studies 64.263 (February 2013), 12744:
1357.
66
Variorum Yeats, 5435, 547.
67
Adrian Paterson, Synges Violin: Words and Music in Irish Culture, review of Harry
White, Music and the Irish Literary Imagination, Dublin Review of Books 13 (Spring 2010)
<http://www.drb.ie/more_details/10-02-19/Synges_Violin.aspx> accessed 1 August 2012.
As well as Whites study and Patersons critique, see: Harry White, The Keepers Recital:
Music and Cultural History in Ireland, 17701970 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998);
Adrian Paterson, Words for Music Perhaps: W.B. Yeats and Musical Sense, DPhil thesis,
University of Oxford, 2007; Sen Crosson, The Given Note: Traditional Music and Modern
Irish Poetry (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008); Ron Schuchard, The Last
Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008); Adrian Paterson, Drawing Breath: The Origins of Moores Irish Melodies, in Jim
Kelly, ed., Ireland and Romanticism: Public, Nations and Scenes of Cultural Production
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 12540; Emilie Morin, Samuel Beckett, the
Wordless Song and the Pitfalls of Memorialisation, Irish Studies Review 19.2 (May 2011),
185205.
68
Bernard ODonoghue, Poetry in Ireland, in Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly, eds,
The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), 17389: 176.

within a self-conscious and constructed poetic tradition. Bringing together
language, music, orality, voice, performer, and audience, the idea of song
has been one of the central means through which Irish poets and critics
have reected on poetrys nature and purpose. The obligation to sing has
acted as a pressure, as part of the eld of expectations regarding how Irish
literature might become, as Thomas MacDonagh hoped, from, by, of, to,
and for the Irish people.69 Cultural nationalism has been preoccupied
with nding writers who might at once speak for and forge a national
identity, as David Lloyd suggests, and this dilemma has often been
gured in terms of song.70
A sense of songs relationship to poetry in the broader culture is
necessary to understand what is at stake in MacNeices responses to Yeatss
work. The recurrent promise of folk song in particular is access to the
voice of the people. In the 1890s, Patrick Pearse wrote that: The folk-
song proper is the product of a folk-poet, and the common possession of a
folk-people.71 As such, it is the product of and basis for identity. Folk
song can also offer a sense of connection to the past. Pointing to Johann
Gottfried Herders inuence in Ireland, Emilie Morin describes how for
Herder the folk songs unfathomable historical origins [ . . . ] facilitate the
recovery of a trans-historical continuity originating from a pure state of
civilization. This process recurs in Pearses strain to establish the antique
origins of folk songs: nothing is more probable than that there is many a
folk-song sung today around the turf-re of a Munster cabin, or on the
bare side of a Connacht mountain, which has been sung by generation
after generation since the Gael rst set foot in Eire.72 Political effects later
come into play in Pearses 1915 play The Singer. At its start, the singer
MacDaras voice is evoked as a memory, having comforted the orphaned
Sighle: the words and the music grew very caressing and soothing like, . . .
like my mothers hand. As the play unfolds, song becomes effective as
well as affective, shifting into being described as a form of political oratory:
Oh, I would like to see the man that has set their hearts on re with the
breath of his voice! By the end, action becomes gured as a better form of
speech. After his brother Colm leaves to ght, MacDara is called on by the
villagers to respond, but replies: Has not Colm spoken by his deed
69
Thomas MacDonagh, Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish (Dublin:
Talbot Press, 1916), viii.
70
David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment
(Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993), 88.
71
P.H. Pearse, The Folk Songs of Ireland, in Three Lectures on Irish Topics (Dublin:
M.H. Gill and Son, 1898), 3245: 39.
72
Morin, Samuel Beckett, the Wordless Song and the Pitfalls of Memorialisation,
1901; Pearse, The Folk Songs of Ireland, 378.
Yeatss MacNeice 31
already?73 The limits of song are reached at the point where martyrdom
takes over, as the play outlines a poetics of song that emphasizes songs
radicalizing potential on the journey towards revolutionary violence.
Pearses work offers a blatant example of how the literary evocation of
song becomes aligned with cultural politics. This kind of thinking, how-
ever, occurs in less overt forms elsewhere. Connection to the people, past,
and place through song is, of course, bound up with the question of
the Irish language. For Pearse this operates in terms of acts of actual
linguistic revival. For others, the alignment and idealization of language
and music move towards what Harry White describes as a discourse of
symbolic projection, dispossession, and repossession [ . . . ] related to the
presence and absence of the Irish language, in which literature in English
might somehow express, or even possess, the integrity and imaginative
purity of Gaelic culture.74 Near the start of his career, Yeats claimed that
in being part of the Irish tradition, he would sing to sweeten Irelands
wrong through ballad and story, rann and song, a project that he returns
to in more ambivalent and vituperative terms in the 1930s, through
sequences such as Words for Music Perhaps.75 Also from the 1930s,
the speaker of Padraic Fallons poem Seeking mutters like a fool while
wandering in search of inspiration. He enviously compares himself to the
seventeenth-century Gaelic post-bardic priest-poet Brian Mac Giolla
Phdriag who, having slept upon a lios (a ring fort or fairy mound, so
an example of continuity with the past), now sings as though a star were
trumpeting.76 Such inspired singing represents a bridge between the
transcendental and an imaginative possession of the land, as Mac Giolla
Phdriag is described as needing but to shut his hares eyes | To nd the
soft blue country. The speaker in Seeking, in contrast, must take to:
The small roads where the pale skies break
In foam along each lonely rise:
Lone as the lark in a high gap alone
Herding his little ocks of Tune.77
73
Pdraic H. Pearse, The Singer and Other Plays (Dublin: Maunsel, 1918), 6, 10, 423.
74
Harry White, Music and the Irish Literary Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), viii, 8.
75
Variorum Yeats, 276300; Yeats, Higgins, and Duff, eds, Broadsides; W.B. Yeats, and
Dorothy Wellesley, eds, Broadsides: A Collection of New Irish and English Songs (Dublin:
Cuala Press, 1937).
76
Joep Leerssen, Mere Irish and For-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its
Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century (2nd edn, Cork: Cork
University Press, 1996), 2034; Sen Tuama and Thomas Kinsella, An Duanaire
16001900: Poems of the Dispossessed (Mountrath: Dolmen, 1981), 8992.
77
Padraic Fallon, Seeking, The Dublin Magazine 8.4 (OctoberDecember 1933), 3.

In place of Yeatss condent assertion of his inheritance of a tradition of
song (and of an audience to address), Fallons speaker wanders alone and
disempowered, hoping that the landscape will reveal its visionary secret.
Not entirely differently, although very much without the antiquarian
investment in the past and the Irish language tradition, Patrick Kavanaghs
uncollected 1936 poem Listen, seeks to revive poetry in the derelict
present by negotiating with the notion of song.78 Through the command
to listen to this hour with earth-ears, a more grounded poetic, reect-
ive of contemporary reality, is presented as creating a different kind of
tune:
not a marching tune,
For soldier-maddened feet,
But an air like peace and fullness in garnered wheat.
Let us listen
Let us listen.
This realist-pastoral imperative to listen stands at an explicit remove
from The Singers martial sense of song. However, Kavanagh, Pearse,
Yeats, Fallon, and many other Irish poets in the early to mid twentieth
century might be seen as operating in relation to what Maureen McLane
describes as a minstrelsy complex. Discussing eighteenth- and nine-
teenth-century British Romantic poetry, McLane views its pervasive
depictions of minstrelsy, that trope of poetic inheritance, transmission
and imminent obsolescence, as indicative of poetrys effort to straddle and
render ambiguous various geographical, political, linguistic, and aesthetic
divisions:
the imperial/national/regional borders constituted by the 1707 Act of Union
that created Great Britain; the border between orality and literacy; between
the popular and the rened; speech and writing; improvisation and xed
transcription; common language and poetic diction.
Moving beyond its antiquarian origins, the minstrelsy complex becomes
central to how Romantic poetry explores problems of poetic authority.79
This notion clearly does not map straightforwardly on to twentieth-
century Irish poetry, not least because eighteenth-century Irish cultural
revival was an inuence on Romantic aesthetics, just as Romantic poetics
78
Patrick Kavanagh, Listen, Ireland To-Day 1.5 (October 1936), 61. In the same issue,
Kavanaghs The Hired Boy rejects the Aisling tradition: In dreams he never married a lady |
To be dream-divorced again.
79
Maureen N. McLane, Balladering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic
Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 57, 144.
Yeatss MacNeice 33
inuenced subsequent Irish literature.80 But many of McLanes borders
do pertain to modern Irish poetry, such as between orality and literacy, as
do the geographical and political divisions created by Home Rule, parti-
tion, and civil war, and the linguistic barrier operating between Irish and
English. The manner in which Irish poets have used song, the way in
which it has become central to questions of authority, has also been a
question of straddling and making ambiguous such divisions. Irish poets
have also at times struggled under the pressure to transcend completely the
divisions of minstrelsy, to recover a still more unied role for the poet,
exhibiting what might be termed a full-blown bardic complex.
MacNeices work seems to stand at an engaged remove from much
contemporaneous Irish poetry. He is aware of Irish poetrys achievements
but is also unable to ignore the particularities of his own experience or the
perspective of the beleaguered contemporary poet within modernity more
generally. Whether an integrated culture, with song at its core, might be
available is explored via the comparative case of the Scottish Western Isles
in the opening to his 1938 travelogue I Crossed the Minch.81 MacNeices
opening frankly admits that he travelled to the Hebrides hoping that the
Celt in him would be drawn to the surface by the magnetism of his
fellows, only to nd that: By blood I may be nearer to a Hebridean than a
cockney, but my whole upbringing has alienated me from that natural
(some will call it primitive) culture which in the British Isles today is only
found on the Celtic or backward fringes. In an apparent reworking of the
austerities of Wordsworths The Solitary Reaper (1805), MacNeice offers
a parable on this sentimental and futile hope for the emergence of some
form of racial kinship:
Once, sitting by a river drinking beer with some Lewismen while one of
them sang a love-song in Gaelic, I felt strongly that I belonged to these
people and that, for all I cared, London could sink in the mud. But the
conviction of alcohol does not last. The next day in Stornoway I rushed to
the stationers to try to buy a copy of the Listener.
The seeming power of song to cross the linguistic barrier between Gaelic
and English, which MacNeice admits has left him unable to become
80
See David Duff and Catherine Jones, eds, Scotland, Ireland and the Romantic Aesthetic
(Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007).
81
See: Terence Brown, MacNeices Irelands, MacNeices Islands, in Vincent Newey
and Ann Thompson, eds, Literature and Nationalism (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 1991), 22538; John Kerrigan, Louis MacNeice among the Islands, in Peter
Mackay, Edna Longley, and Fran Brearton, eds, Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 5886; Heather Clark, Leaving Barra, Leaving
Inishmore: Islands in the Irish Protestant Imagination, The Canadian Journal of Irish
Studies 35.2 (Autumn 2009), 305: 312.

intimate with the lives of the people, does not withstand sober reection.
Any listening or singing that MacNeice might do will unavoidably take
place within Anglo-capitalist modernity, mediated by print and radio, as
shown by his buying of the BBC magazine. The more modernized town of
Stornoway on Lewis becomes associated throughout the book with the
invasion of the Hebrides by the forces of commercialization, in contrast to
the more isolated islands to the south. The sentimentality of the love song
that MacNeice is enthralled by is thrown into further relief by the account
that follows of the division of labour in the islands tweed industry. The
wool now comes to the crofters ready spun and dyed, and is no longer
waulked after its weaving: The decay of these arts means the disappear-
ance of the songs which attended themthe spinning songs and waulking
songs.82 This sense of a passing culture in which work and art were
integrated, such that work becomes another art and song an aspect of
work, stands in contrast to MacNeices preceding experience of song as a
seductive leisure pursuit, as a question of affect. In terms of his failure to
access these islanders culture, MacNeice is not just unable to speak their
language, but also stands outside of their whole, declining, way of life.
The economic and cultural changes occurring nd a summation in
Bagpipe Music, a poem MacNeice later described as a satirical elegy for
the Gaelic districts of Scotland and indeed on all traditional culture.83
The shift from an isolated, traditional culture to a global and modern one
is signied through the mechanical reproduction of foreign music: Annie
MacDougall went to milk, caught her foot in the heather, | Woke to hear a
dance record playing of Old Vienna. MacNeice later tracks this change
more expansively in recounting two dances on Lewis. The rst, in the
remote Shawbost, offers the remnants of a genuine folk culture: They
danced only Highland dances, the single lamp in the room throwing wild
shadows on the wall, upung hands as exclamatory as the whooping of the
dancers.84 Yet it also marks a shift in sensibility, as MacNeice points to
the new adoption of Highland costume by one of the pipers. Such a self-
conscious spectacle is much in evidence at a concert back in Stornoway:
The Lewis Pipe Band [ . . . ] obsessed the stage like gaudy grotesque
vegetationwhich was followed by another dance in which the pipes
gave way to the saxophone and they danced fox-trotsrather jerkily as
might be expected.85 John Kerrigan illuminatingly comments that: The
Gaels danced jerkily because they were unpractical in fashionable ways but
also because they were becoming the objectied, alienated products of the
82
MacNeice, I Crossed the Minch, 79.
83
Ibid., 1634; MacNeice, Collected Poems, 956; Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice, 212.
84 85
Ibid., 21112. Ibid., 2212.
Yeatss MacNeice 35
music industry.86 For MacNeice, there is no going back to an older, more
communal, sense of song and dance, as Bagpipe Music builds towards a
sense of all-encompassing catastrophe that will see off the old and the new:
Its no go the gossip column, its no go the Ceilidh. A satiric variant of the
post-Romantic minstrelsy complex is offered through the poems parody
of a traditional ballad, the bad feminine rhymes of which, MacNeice
remarked, are meant to suggest the wheeze of the pipes.87 Counter-
pointed against this inauthentic voice, as Danson Brown notes, are
credible vernacular tones (Sit on your arse, Threw the bleeders
back) with an undeceived sense of political reality: Work your hands
from day to day, the winds will blow the prot.88 In relation to Irish
poetry, the farce, as Kerrigan notes, is shiftingly IrishScottish. Its
parody of the traditional nestles alongside a seeming dig at the spiritualist
escape routes of Yeats and George Russell (AE): Its no go the Yogi-Man,
its no go Blavatsky.89 If the poem is a satirical elegy [ . . . ] for all
traditional culture, it is also memorializing and sending up those who
would seek to sideline the economic and cultural pressures of modernity
through the discovery and revival of such traditional culturea point with
many possible targets in relation to Ireland in the period.
MacNeices exploration of modern poetrys relation to traditional cul-
ture in I Crossed the Minch, his self-dramatizing rejection of what it has
come to mean to be an Irish poet in Valediction, and his prolonged
intertextual encounters with Yeats constitute an extensive, though mostly
implicit, engagement with modern Irish poetry. MacNeices work can be
placed alongside contemporaneous interventions on the current and
future shape of Irish literary culture that grapple with arts place in relation
to the nation and modernity in the context of the new political dispensa-
tion, post-partition and independence. These range from the Irish Ireland
polemic of Daniel Corkerys Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (1931) to the
more pluralistic critical agendas pursued by younger writers such as
Padraic Fallon, Austin Clarke, Blanaid Salkeld, Frank OConnor, Sen
OFaolin, Denis Devlin, and Niall Sheridan, in periodicals such as The
Dublin Magazine and Ireland To-Day, and including Yeats and Higginss
Broadsides project. Two decades later, Fallon saw the 1930s as a period in
which Irish poets felt overwhelming frustration at being steamrolled out
of existence for pursuing their own idiom: The Faber booklets lifted
86
Kerrigan, Louis MacNeice among the Islands, 73.
87
88
Richard Danson Brown, Louis MacNeice and the Poetry of the 1930s (Tavistock:
Northcote House, 2009), 72.
89

their hindlegs at you from every bookshop [ . . . ] If you didnt write the
English way, you were out.90 As a Faber poet, MacNeice was perhaps a
target for some of this frustration, but he was also offering alternative
diagnoses as to its causes. Close to MacNeice in terms of its vehement
estrangement from cultural nationalism is Samuel Becketts 1934 essay
Recent Irish Poetry.91 It similarly asserts changed circumstances, the
new thing [ . . . ] the breakdown of the object, and its criticisms of those
operating unaware of such a rupture are again cast in terms of song and
its Romantic revival: the thermolators (a term by which Beckett mock-
ingly refers to revivalist poets) adoring the stuff of song as incorruptible,
uninjurable and unchangeable [ . . . ] the antiquarians, delivering with the
altitudinous complacency of the Victorian Gael the Ossianic goods. The
placing of Yeats within Becketts essay is unclear. Many of his themes are
ridiculed: Oisin, Cuchulain, Maeve, Tir-nanog, the Tin Bo Cuailgne,
Yoga, the Crone of Bearesegment after segment, of cut-and-dried
sanctity and loveliness. Yet Yeatss awareness of the superannuation of
his past modes is also acknowledged. Parody also mixes criticism with the
tribute of familiarity, as Morin almost suggests:
the contrast between Becketts simplistic analysis of the Revival period and
his informed handling of Yeatss poetry leads the review beyond a simple
opposition of tradition to experiment. It enables Beckett to parody that for
which he displays resentment: not simply the parochialism of Irish letters,
but the manner in which stylistic and thematic conventions hinder literary
experiment.92
If the extent of Becketts informed negotiation of Irish literary perspectives
in the 1930s is now clearer, the similarities of their terms and means of
critique also show that MacNeice was undergoing a similar process. Like
Beckett, MacNeice was contending with what had become by that point
in cultural history, to use Morins useful phrase, the problem of Irishness.
* * *
MacNeices poetry of the early 1930s confronts Yeats and Irish literary
culture more generally with a subtlety that MacNeice did not achieve in
his critical prose until his full-length study of Yeats. The poems written in
90
Padraic Fallon, Journal, The Bell 17.9 (December 1951), repr. in A Poets Journal and
Other Writings, 19341974, ed. Brian Fallon (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2005), 1622: 19.
91
Andrew Belis [Samuel Beckett], Recent Irish Poetry, The Bookman 86 (August
1934), repr. in Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment,
ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983), 706.
92
Emilie Morin, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009), 35.
Yeatss MacNeice 37
1934 were followed by a degree of retrospective critical evaluation in
which MacNeice outlined his aesthetic and wrote about poetry as an
evangelist [ . . . ] of his generation.93 In doing so, he simplied the
implications of his early poetry. Moreover, Yeats is a more muted inter-
textual presence in The Earth Compels, MacNeices next collection, chim-
ing with Jon Stallworthys account of MacNeice telling Grigson he had
given up rereading Yeats for fear of being inuenced.94 In Poetry To-day
(1935), MacNeice argues for the primacy of Eliot: the history of post-
War poetry in England is the history of Eliot and the reaction from Eliot.
Yeats is hardly accommodated. He is initially complimented as part of the
Irish movement, where poetry was healthily mixed up with politics, but
then disappears until the essays end, when MacNeice describes him as a
model, the best example of how a poet ought to develop if he goes on
writing till he is old, who:
technically [ . . . ] offers many parallels to the youngest English poets.
Spender is like him in that they both have worked hard to attain the
signicant statement, avoiding the obvious rhythm and the easy blurb.
Auden and Day-Lewis both use epithets in Yeatss latest manner. But
when all is said, Yeats is esoteric. He is further away from the ordinary
English reader or writer than Eliot is; not only because of his cabbalistic
symbols, etc., but even more because of the dominance in him of the local
factor. His rhythms and the texture of his lines are inextricably implicated
with his peculiar past and even with the Irish landscape.95
Yeats does not t into MacNeices description of Poetry To-day as a return
to poetry concerned with life achieved under the star of Eliot. Concerned
with life and the esoteric, Yeats provides a model of poetic development and
technique, but his Irishness, despite healthily mixing him up with politics,
distances him from the ordinary English reader. In Subject in Modern
Poetry (1936), Yeats begins to edge past Eliot, having worked his way, by
devious routes of hoodoo and wilful creeds to a poetry which is concerned
with life, a limited life but not so limited as Mr. Eliots. MacNeice defends
Yeatss esoteric interests: seeing the world through a series of eccentric
home-made frames does not mean he sees it false. Auden and Spender are
also identied as following Yeats rather than Eliot.96 MacNeice wrote
Some Notes on Mr. Yeatss Plays in New Verse and reviewed A Full Moon
in March and Dramatis Personae in between the publication of Poetry
93 94
Longley, Louis MacNeice, 956. Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice, 253.
95
Louis MacNeice, Poetry To-day, 39, 13, 401.
96
Louis MacNeice, Subject in Modern Poetry (1936), repr. in Selected Literary
Criticism of Louis MacNeice, 5774: 645, 723.

To-day and Subject on Modern Poetry.97 The critical engagement with
Yeats was burgeoning. But the older poet retained enigmatic status; Mac-
Neice could not yet acknowledge that part of the problem was with his own
critical criteria.
That Yeats does not t into this schema becomes clear in 1938s
Modern Poetry. As Longley notes, it is more a manifesto than survey.98
MacNeice rails against poetry divorced from life: Parnassianism and
Symbolism in France, the poetry of the nineties in England, and, later,
Imagism in America, were all attempts to divorce art from life.99 In
contrast, he registers a plea for impure poetry [ . . . ] conditioned by the
poets life and the world around him, based on a sense of words as a
community product and a vehicle of communication. But Yeats has a
foot in both worlds: he is a disciple of Pater who remembers forgotten
beauty and a poet capable of expressing strong opinions on contemporary
events who talks of writing our thoughts down in as nearly as possible the
language we thought them in. MacNeice decides that Yeatss world-view
is so esoteric that he can only escape from literature at odd moments, as he
maintains a simplistic distinction between poetry that is connected with
life and poetry that separates itself from life.100 He is making the case for
Auden and Spender as poets who offer a return to impure poetry.
However, in doing so he cannot reconcile the Yeatsian poles of esoteri-
cism and public involvement.101
Yeatss critical response to MacNeice, however, appeared unchanged in
The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Its introduction differentiates modern
Irish poetry from modern British poetry, again through its relationship
with folk song and its engagement with the Gaelic tradition, while also
stressing the lack of philosophy in Irish poetry: A distinguished Irish poet
said a month back [ . . . ] We cannot become philosophic like the English,
our lives are too exciting. He goes on: Irish by tradition and many
ancestors, I love, though I have nothing to offer but the philosophy they
deride, swashbucklers, horsemen, swift indifferent men. According to
Yeats, although he is philosophical, Irish poetry is not. MacNeice is
implicitly excluded from this construction of Irish poetry too. Yeats states
that Day Lewis, Madge, MacNeice, are modern through the character of
97
MacNeice, Some Notes on Mr. Yeatss Plays, 79; Louis MacNeice, The Newest
Yeats, review of W.B. Yeats, A Full Moon in March, New Verse 19 (FebruaryMarch 1936),
repr. in Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice, 445; Louis MacNeice, review of
W.B. Yeats, Dramatis Personae, Criterion 16.62 (October 1936), 1202.
98
99
Louis MacNeice, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (London: Oxford University Press,
1938), 3.
100 101
Ibid., preface, 3, 5, 214. Longley, Louis MacNeice, 99.
Yeatss MacNeice 39
their intellectual passion and highlights the concentration of philosophy
in their work. He admits to preferring at times their poems to Eliots or
even his own, but claims that his admiration is qualied by his nationality:
Although I have preferred, and shall again, constrained by a different
nationality, a man so many years old, xed to some one place, known to
friend and enemies, full of mortal frailty, expressing all things not made
mysterious by nature with impatient clarity, I have read with some excite-
ment poets I had approached with distaste, delighted in their pure spiritual
objectivity as in something long foretold.
Yeats denes a model Irish poet, in contrast to the sort of poet that
MacNeice is, but this also excludes much of his own poetry. This is
underlined by a comment on MacNeices politics: MacNeice, the anti-
communist, expecting some descent of barbarism next turn of the wheel.102
As Longley points out, Yeats over-identies with MacNeice, aligning the
younger poet with the more apocalyptic parts of his own oeuvre.103 With
four poems over eight pages, MacNeice is well represented in the anthol-
ogy.104 The selection supports the introductions emphasis on the intellec-
tual and the apocalyptic in MacNeices work: in Eclogue for Christmas a
speaker predicts that: We shall go down like paleolithic man | Before some
new Ice Age; Turf-stacks asserts that those unlucky enough not to be
peasants among turf-stacks, will be faced by theory-vendors [ . . . ] Who tilt
their aggregate beast against our crumbling Troy; and The Individualist
Speaks prophesizes avenging youth threatening war.105 MacNeice is
manoeuvred into a Yeatsian position, but one that excludes him from an
Irish poetic identity characterized by its indifference to philosophy.
MacNeice makes one further appearance in Yeatss prose, in his preface
to the Ten Principal Upanishads (1937). Considering modern religious
instinct, Yeats argues that since the early 1920s poetry has begun to create
myths like those of antiquity, and to ask the most profound questions.
Viewing the younger generation of the 1930s as having brought a more
minute psychological curiosity [ . . . ] to the same preoccupations, he is
semi-critical:
In their pursuit of meaning, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Auden, Laura Riding
have thrown off too much, as I think, the old metaphors, the sensuous
tradition of the poets:
102
W.B. Yeats, ed., The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 18921935 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1936), xivxv, xxxvixxxviii, xlii.
103
Longley, Anxieties of Inuence and Succession, 142.
104
Yeats, ed., Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 41927.
105
MacNeice, Collected Poems, 37, 1516, 16. The other poem anthologized is Circe.

High on some mountain shelf
Huddle the pitiless abstractions bald about the neck;
but have found, perhaps the more easily for that sacrice, a neighbourhood
where some new Upanishad, some half-Asiatic masterpiece, may start up
amid our averted eyes.106
The lines quoted come from Eclogue for Christmas, again casting
MacNeice as the exemplar of the radical modern poet, intellectually
engaged yet lacking something sensuous. Yeats is bequeathing an inher-
itance in which his own spiritual quest will nd continuation in some
half-Asiatic masterpiece that MacNeice might write. In doing so, he is
again separating out the dialectic in his own poetry: between this strain of
philosophical poetry that he attributes to MacNeice, and the poetry of
swashbucklers, horsemen, swift indifferent men that he claims charac-
terizes Irish poetry.107
The limitations of this attempt to characterize MacNeice as the kind of
spiritual poet capable of writing some new Upanishad were underlined
by the appearance of Autumn Journal, in May 1939, soon after Yeatss
death. Its journal structure, being, as MacNeice explained in a prefatory
note, neither nal nor balanced, recasts the Yeatsian dialectic, offering
space for rumination and action, the abstract and the concrete, the public
and the private.108 The description of real events in the poem, such as the
reminiscence of a visit to Spain, With Valdepeas burdening the breath,
contrasts with more abstract discussion, such as a farewell to philosophy:
So blow the bugles over the metaphysicians, | Let the pure mind return to
the Pure Mind.109 Ignoring Yeatss critical categorizations, MacNeice also
turns to Ireland. In section XVI, he draws on Yeatss past responses to war
to inform the dilemmas of 19381939.110 Easter 1916 and Meditations
in Time of Civil War are echoed in the envying of men of action and yet
voicing doubts about their actions. Yeatss poetry is shown to undermine
his prescriptions as regards Irish character through its capacity for the
contemplation of ambiguities. The speaker also points to Yeatss own
106
W.B. Yeats, Preface, in The Ten Principal Upanishads, trans. Shree Purohit Swmi
and W.B. Yeats (1937), repr. in W.B. Yeats, Later Essays, ed. William H. ODonnell (New
York: Scribners, 1994), 1724.
107
Yeats, ed., Oxford Book of Modern Verse, xv, xxxvii. In Under Ben Bulben, he wills
future Irish poets to Sing the peasantry, and then | Hard-riding country gentlemen
(Variorum Yeats, 639).
108
MacNeice, Collected Poems, 791. On the poems genre and form see: Danson Brown,
Louis MacNeice, 7283; Glyn Maxwell, Turn and Turn Against: The Case of Autumn
Journal, in Brearton and Longley, eds, Incorrigibly Plural, 17189; Longley, Yeats and
Modern Poetry, 1757.
109
MacNeice, Collected Poems, 11214, 1302.
110
Ibid., 13741; Longley, Anxieties of Inuence and Succession, 152.
Yeatss MacNeice 41
revision of his poetic past. A questioning of the feminization of Ireland,
Why | Must a country, like a ship or a car, be always female, | Mother or
Sweetheart?, evokes Yeatss Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902). But the terms in
which MacNeice then denounces the legacy of such thinking, each one in
his will | Binds his heirs to continuance of hatred, echoes Yeatss Remorse
for Intemperate Speech (1931) in which fanaticism is cast as an inherit-
ance: I carry from my mothers womb | A fanatic heart.111 The use
MacNeice makes of Yeatss shifting critical tone is illustrated in the
sections criticisms of the Free States isolationist policies:
Ourselves alone! Let the round tower stand aloof
In a world of bursting mortar!
Let the school-children fumble their sums
In a half-dead language;
Let the censor be busy on the books; pull down the
Georgian slums;
Let the games be played in Gaelic.
The echo of Yeatsian denunciation, as Longley describes, links a ubi-
quitous adjective for Yeatsaloofwith an icon of Irish antiquarianism
to accuse contemporary cultural and literary nationalism of evading his-
tory.112 MacNeice employs Yeatss poetic resources and critical tren-
chancy to undermine the rebarbative and isolationist legacy Yeats seems
to be trying to shape for Irish poetry.
This section of Autumn Journal also explores the hardening of divisions
between the post-partition North and South of Ireland to imply a further
evasion of contemporary literary nationalism. Several items addressed
directly relate to aspects of the 1937 Irish constitution that seemed to
solidify a near-theocratic twenty-six-county state, with strong censorship,
prohibition on divorce, and compulsory education in Irish. That it closed
off routes to reunication seemed to be conrmed when Viscount Crai-
gavon, the Ulster unionist Prime Minister, called and overwhelmingly
won an election in Northern Ireland in February 1938. The election was
accompanied by sectarian violence, which had been on the rise for some
time: 1933 had seen the rst sectarian murder in Belfast since 1922 and
riots occurred in the city throughout the summer of 1935.113 A reality
largely passed over in Yeatss work, as well as in Irish cultural nationalism
111
112
Longley, Anxieties of Inuence and Succession, 153.
113
Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ulster (new edn, Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2001),
53944. On MacNeices fathers responses to sectarian violence, see David Fitzpatrick,
Solitary and Wild: Frederick MacNeice and the Salvation of Ireland (Dublin: Lilliput Press,
2012), 21660.

of the period more generally, the situation in Northern Ireland is outlined
in considerable detail by MacNeice. It is approached through his child-
hood, as he remembers expecting When the wind blew from the west, the
noise of shooting | Starting in the evening at eight | In Belfast. A different
perspective is opened up on what political action might mean. The
ambiguity of Yeatss uneasy responses to the violent upheavals of the
1910s and 1920s is extended through the evocation of Ulsters sectarian
stalemate: Up the rebels, To Hell with the Pope, | And God Saveas you
preferthe King or Ireland. The sense of an alternative source of violence
is further emphasized by a vision of unionist intransigence, marchers
banners of King William ominously Waving thousands of swords and
ready to ght | Till the blue sea turns to orange. MacNeice nds in this
other Ireland another state inclined to censorship and unaccommodating
to its minority:
A city built upon mud;
A culture built upon prot;
Free speech nipped in the bud,
The minority always guilty.
Why should I want to go back
To you, Ireland, my Ireland?
The rst four lines take on a Yeatsian tone, as they slip into shorter,
rhythmically and rhetorically tighter, end-stopped lines, bringing the
alternate pair of rhymes and half-rhymes into focus. Their emphatic list
of statements resemble the prophesizing of apocalypse in The Second
Coming, Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; | Mere anarchy is
loosed upon the world, while rhythmically they replicate the short-line
poem with three of four stresses to a line, of which MacNeice acknow-
ledged Yeatss mastery.114 This modes capacity to respond to the present
state of Ireland challenges Yeatss conception of Ireland. In the nal
question, Yeatss recurrent identication with Ireland is recast as a dis-
avowal, but of MacNeices Ireland: an Ireland that is Craigavons as well as
de Valeras.
MacNeices poetry benets from his arrival at an understanding that
one has to be careful not to accept literally what Yeats says about himself
and that Yeats often succeeded by breaking his own rules.115 Yeatsian
technique became a resource, a means to confront reality rather than
escape it. Such exibility did not always go down well with other Irish
writers. Austin Clarkes cool review of Autumn Journal takes political
114
Variorum Yeats, 4012; MacNeice, Poetry of W.B. Yeats, 114.
115
Ibid., 20.
Yeatss MacNeice 43
issue with MacNeice, accusing him of being the complete moralist when
it comes to his own country and adopting a manner which we usually
associate with the typical West Briton.116 Clarkes critique is not just a
case of political disagreement, but of excluding MacNeice from the
Irish literary domain. This is seen by Clarkes response to The Poetry of
W.B. Yeats. He wrote hostile reviews of MacNeices study in both The
Irish Times and The Dublin Magazine, casting it as an attempt to remove
Yeats from the Irish literary revival, and present him against an English
background.117 Clarke complains: Apart from Yeats, [MacNeice] dis-
misses most contemporary Irish poetry in a few lines of ill-disguised
contempt and, though it is obvious from his book that he is little
acquainted with Irish letters as a whole, this does not prevent him from
indulging in disparagement.118 Clarkes criticisms recur in a review by his
associate Roiberd Farachin (Robert Farren) in The Bell: MacNeice
has, apparently, accepted not English but English-cosmopolitan stand-
ards, modied by a dash of Irish knowledge and feeling. MacNeice is
again faulted for his limited knowledge of Irish letters, emphasizing in his
study the inuence of J.M. Synge, Lady Gregory, and Douglas Hyde
rather than seeing that Yeatss juniors [ . . . ] gave him a good deal back.
MacNeice does not comprehend how Yeats was kept close to the Irish
tradition and saved from his itch to fantasticate by James Stephenss
hard-bitten diction, Padraic Colums earthy lines, and Higginss zest
for folk-song. MacNeice is though well-equipped to draw out the leading
ideas of Yeatss philosophy.119 Echoing Yeatss earlier terms of analysis
in terms of the separation between thinking and singing, MacNeice is kept
beyond the bounds of Irish literature. If what distinguishes MacNeices
relationship with Ireland, particularly during the 1930s is, as Alan Gillis
suggests, the ferocity of his attacks on it, it must be recognized that
literary Ireland attacked MacNeice back.120
Clarke and Farachins complaints seem, even on their own terms,
unjust. Although The Poetry of W.B. Yeats is clearly aimed at a non-Irish
readership, it devotes considerable space to Yeatss Irish historical and
116
Austin Clarke, review of Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal, The Dublin Magazine
14.3 (JulySeptember 1939), 824, qtd in Longley, Anxieties of Inuence and Succes-
sion, 1512.
117
Austin Clarke, Poetry of W.B. Yeats: An Extremely Irascible Guide , review of
Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats, The Irish Times (15 March 1941), 5.
118
Austin Clarke, review of Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats, The Dublin
Magazine 16.2 (AprilJune 1941), repr. in Reviews and Essays of Austin Clarke, ed. Gregory
A. Schirmer (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1995), 1718.
119
Roiberd Farachin, review of Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats, The
Bell 2.2 (May 1941), 935.
120
Gillis, Irish Poetry of the 1930s, 28.

literary contexts, placing more emphasis on them than some of Yeatss
celebrated early critics, such as Richard Ellmann and T.R. Henn.121 The
third chapter is an introductory view of The Irish Background. MacNeice
tracks the shift from Yeatss orthodox and romantic early nationalism
to the more disillusioned attitudes of his later career. Figures discussed
include Thomas Davis, John OLeary, AE, Constance Markievicz, Maud
Gonne, Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, Matthew Arnold, Thomas
MacDonagh, Sen OFaolin, John Todhunter, Frank OConnor, Lionel
Johnson, Padraic Colum, Thomas Moore, James Clarence Mangan, and
William Allingham.122 The chapter emphasizes the impact of public
events, particularly the shock of the Easter Rising. It attaches particular
importance to Irelands landscape: there is something palpably in common
between the subtle colour and movement of his verse and that western
landscape which is at the same time delicate and strong. It turns to a set of
antinomies in seeking to negotiate the danger of generalizing about Ireland
and the Irish.123 MacNeice also enters into debate about Yeatss early
Arnoldian misrepresentation of the genius of Gael by way of examples
drawn from early Irish poetry and the Anglo-Irish ballad tradition.124
Attention is often paid to Irish contexts in the ve chapters that follow.
The consideration of Yeatss conception of popular poetry in the chapter
on The Early Poems, for instance, refers to Allingham and Samuel
Ferguson, while the fth chapter devotes space to recounting an 1899
controversy played out between Yeats, John Eglinton, AE, and William
Larminie.125 The nal chapter, Some Comparisons, includes a lengthy
section discussing AE, John Todhunter, T.W. Rolleston, Katherine Tynan,
William Larminie, Seamus OSullivan, Padraic Colum, Joseph Campbell,
Douglas Hyde, Thomas MacDonagh, Frank OConnor, F.R. Higgins,
Leslie Daiken, and even Austin Clarke himself, in which MacNeices tone
is far from contemptuous.126
A criticism MacNeice does venture is that OSullivan, Colum, and
Campbell did not copy the broad sweep of Yeats and their poetry lacks
brainwork.127 This suggests something of MacNeices own wide-ranging
response to Yeats, but also points to what may have caused unease within
Irish circles. Taking Yeatss full range of work seriously, MacNeices study
considers intellectual and literary perspectives outside the framework of
Irish identity. The chapter on Aestheticism outlines the milieu that Yeats
121
Richard Ellmann, The Man and his Masks (London: Macmillan, 1948); T.R. Henn,
The Lonely Tower: Studies in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats (London: Metheun, 1950).
122 123
MacNeice, Poetry of W.B. Yeats, 3954. Ibid., 45.
124 125
Ibid., 526. Ibid., 778, 8792.
126 127
Ibid., 20817. Ibid., 181.
Yeatss MacNeice 45
encountered in London in the 1880s and 1890s. Among other concerns,
this highlights the thought of Walter Pater, outlining his ideas, pointing to
their conceptual limitations and assessing how Yeats diverged from them:
he never tried to conne himself to this impossible ideal of aesthetic
atomism. Yeats was always trying to think of the world as a system, of life
as a pattern.128 When turning to such systematizing in Per Amica Silentia
Lunae (1917) and A Vision (1925 and 1937), MacNeice not only engages
with Yeatss ideasFreedom for Yeats, as for Engels, was a recognition of
necessitybut does so through reference to other currents within intel-
lectual history, such as with the mention of Engels.129 From a literary
standpoint, MacNeices discussion does more than just present Yeats
against an English background, such as through its extended comparison
between the work of Yeats and Rainer Maria Rilke.130 MacNeice suggests
that Yeatss engagement with the Revival and Irish public life were of
central importance to his work: Most of the poets of the Nineties lost
themselves in the sands. Yeats escaped because he harnessed the aesthetic
doctrine to a force outside itself which he found in his own country.131
Yet he does not allow the signicance and importance of Yeatss work to
be conned to Irish perspectives.
Such a comparative and conceptually open approach stands at a com-
plex remove from Austin Clarkes assessment of Yeats in his essay Irish
Poetry To-Day (1935). It stresses the European origins and modernity of
the poetry of the Revival, pointing to the national literary movements in
Belgium and Scandinavia, the inuence of impressionism and symbolism,
and stressing that the new poetry was well in advance of contemporary
English poetry, both in its technique and its subtle range of conscious-
ness. Yet in accounting for Yeatss return to the main sources of English
literature, his intellectual curiosity is highlighted:
When we match the jigsaw puzzles of his various phases, we can see that his
ightiness belongs to the adventurous, restless Anglo-Irish type of the past
[ . . . ] Mr. Yeats, coming too soon before the new forces of racial recovery,
was unable to nd that complete identication of interests which others
found, and with rare artistic integrity continued his search, turning to the
metaphysical Anglicans and modern intellectual encyclopaedism. In express-
ing so completely his own type, Mr. Yeats presents us with the case for
integrity. If we can express eventually our own scholastic mentality in verse,
I believe that our art will lead us not towards, but away from English art.132
128 129 130 131

Ibid., 26. Ibid., 125. Ibid., 1826. Ibid., 38.
132
Austin Clarke, Irish Poetry To-Day, The Dublin Magazine 10.1 (JanuaryMarch
1935), repr. in Reviews and Essays of Austin Clarke, 5662: 56, 589.

On the grounds of his identity and intellectual interests, Clarke casts Yeats
as now outside of the Irish collective. This is plainly a space-clearing move:
Clarkes psychological and theological exploration of Irish Catholicism
might be that very expression of a national scholastic mentality. Yet the
value of Yeatss thought is subsumed by questions of religion and race.
Such an attempt to draw clear lines between English and Irish literature
clearly mirrors Yeatss own pronouncements, but they leave Clarke strug-
gling to understand Yeatss later work. This puzzlement returns in a later
posthumous tribute, in which Clarke describes the mystery of Yeatss
attitude to home rule in Irish letters in his later years, pointing to Under
Ben Bulben in which he seems to abjure the modern English school to
which he had given his powerful inuence and interest. In the face of such
seeming contradiction, Clarke consigns Yeats to a past phase.133 Con-
trastingly, MacNeices study and the poetry he wrote alongside it at the
turn of the decade consciously examine the value of Yeatss work in
relation to the pressures of the present. As the long-feared world war
arrived, it was MacNeice who turned his own brainwork to Yeats.134
133
Austin Clarke, W.B. Yeats, The Dublin Magazine 14.2 (AprilJune 1939), repr. in
Reviews and Essays of Austin Clarke, 913: 13.
134
MacNeice, Poetry of W.B. Yeats, 181.
2
Racial and Regional Rhythms
On 11 July 1939, Louis MacNeice made an early foray into radio

broadcasting. While in Belfast, he took part in a discussion for the BBC
on modern poetry with F.R. Higgins, which was reprinted in The Lis-
tener.1 Higgins combatively asserts the superiority of modern Irish poetry
over English. He attributes this to Irish poets possession of an unbroken
racial rhythm, by which he means a connection to some form of shared
belief emanating from life, from nature, from revealed religion, and from
the nation. This links blood and music in a racially inected version of the
minstrelsy complex, echoing back to Douglas Hydes 1892 declaration of
The Necessity of De-Anglicising Ireland: we must strive to cultivate
everything that is most racial, most smacking of the soil.2 A sceptical
MacNeice asks if this racial rhythm is more important for the poet than
any extra-national rhythms, observing: On those premises there is more
likelihood of good poetry appearing among the Storm Troopers of
Germany than in the cosmopolitan communities of Paris or New York.
Higgins deantly agrees that in some respects I actually believe so,
asserting Irelands distance from the mechanical and mental pressures
besetting industrial England:
traditions, born from the ancient, yet everlasting, soil, maintain a regular
rhythm in keeping with the old racial heart-beat. And that integral life in
rural Ireland breeds, with viciousness, a race of individuals, or personalities
each unique, a law unto himself, yet all in national character.
Defending his English peers, MacNeice points to poets who have written
in less stable conditions, such as Catullus and Lucretius, who embodied
the new ideas and theories which they got from the revolutionary
1
Louis MacNeice and F.R. Higgins, Tendencies in Modern Poetry (transcript), The
Listener 22.550 (27 July 1939), 1856.
2
Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 57; Douglas Hyde, The Neces-
sity of De-Anglicising Ireland (1892), repr. in Charles Duffy, George Sigerson, and
Douglas Hyde, The Revival of Irish Literature and Other Addresses (London: T. Fisher
Unwin, 1894), 11561: 159.

thinkers. Higgins nonetheless asserts the necessity for an adherence to
tradition, reminding MacNeice that you as an Irishman, cannot escape
from your blood, nor from our blood-music that brings the racial charac-
ter to mind. MacNeice replies: I think one may have such a thing as ones
racial blood-music, but that, like ones unconscious, it may be left to take
care of itself. He suggests a more balanced conception of the poet as a
receptive sensitive instrument designed to record anything that interests
his mind or affects his emotions [ . . . ] with as much music as he can
compass.
This broadcast resurfaced in 1986, when Paul Muldoon used an edited
extract from the exchange to preface his Faber Book of Contemporary Irish
Poetry.3 In examining this exchange, Heather Clark argues: Muldoons
implication is, obviously, that MacNeice is the more enlightened of the
two; Higginss ideas about racial character sound almost fascist in
hindsight. MacNeices scepticism towards concepts such as racial
blood-music offers Muldoon licence for his own distance and irony in
relation to the Troubles during the 1980s.4 Muldoon presents MacNeice
as standing at the beginning of a tradition in Irish poetry that has
questioned the inward-looking poetic nationalism espoused by Higgins,
based on questionable notions of blood and race, a tradition that implicitly
includes Muldoon and the few poets included in his anthology.5
This version of MacNeice presents only a partial picture, though,
revealing as much about Muldoons self-fashioning in the mid-1980s as
it does about MacNeices response towards Higgins in the late 1930s. The
on-air confrontation actually marked the beginning of a friendship
between the two poets. In a letter written soon after the exchange
MacNeice reported: Higgins after denouncing me for 24 hours for having
de-Irishised myself asked me if Id like to belong to the Irish Academy of
letters. I said yes.6 That same year, the two poets engaged in another
broadcast, A Literary Night Out, this time on Radio ireann, that aimed
to reproduce the salty, sensitive, exuberant talk of the Dublin literary
3
Paul Muldoon, ed., Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (London: Faber and Faber,
1986).
4
Heather Clark, The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Ulster 19621972 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 1389; Edna Longley, Poetic Forms and Social Malformations, in
The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books,
1994), 196226: 201.
5
The poets included were: Patrick Kavanagh, Louis MacNeice, Thomas Kinsella, John
Montague, Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Paul Durcan, Tom Paulin,
and Medbh McGuckian.
6
Louis MacNeice to Eleanor Clark, 16 July 1939, Bodleian Library, Stallworthy Papers,
Box 30. According the minutes of the Irish Academy of Letters, MacNeice was nally
elected in 1954. Austin Clarke was in the chair. National Library of Ireland, Ms.33.745/I.
Racial and Regional Rhythms 49

pub. Their producer Roiberd Farachin viewed it as a failure: poor
Fred Higgins and poor Louis MacNeice, both good poets, both men of
mind, could not at that time even half-master the very special business of
largely impromptu live broadcasting.7 Higgins died in 1941, but his
memory stayed with MacNeice who proposed a radio feature on Higginss
life and work to the BBC in 1953:
I am told that Brinsley MacNamara, who was a very great friend of Higgins,
is not only willing but anxious to give me all possible data for a programme
about him. When I have assessed the possibilities, I should like to offer this
to Third Programme. Higgins, whom I knew well myself, is practically
unknown here, but was most remarkable, both as a man and a poet. The
nucleus of such a programme would obviously be his poems, but I would
write a considerable amount of linking stuff to suggest the mans personality,
which was an extraordinary blend of delicacy and Falstafanism.8
In Autumn Sequel (1954), MacNeice memorialized Higgins, under the
pseudonym Reilly, as a gure analogous to Dylan Thomas, as discussed
in Chapter 4.9 In 1962, he recollected that
in the late Thirties I came to know Yeatss disciple, the late F.R. Higgins,
who thought I was lacking in singing robes but seemed pleased to let me
beguile him away from the Abbey Theatre when he was supposed to be
rehearsing the company; we used to meet other poets.10
The friendship with Higgins and the returns to his memory suggest that
the distance MacNeice maintained from ideas such as racial character was
not a battle staged and won in a single broadcast. MacNeices discussion
with Higgins formed part of an ongoing struggle with ideas about the
poets connection to place, race, community, and tradition, as seen in
Chapter 1. MacNeice said yes as well as no to Higgins in the years that
followed their encounter in a Belfast radio studio.
The day after the broadcast John Hewitt wrote a letter introducing
himself to MacNeice:
I wish heartily to congratulate you on yr. advocacy of socialist internation-
alism in last nights discussion with Higgins. Yr. defence of contemporary
7
Roiberd Farachin, Some Early Days in Radio, in Louis McRedmond, ed.,
Written on the Wind: Personal Memories of Irish Radio (Dublin: Radio Telefs ireann,
1976), 2950: 40.
8
Louis MacNeice to BBC Features Organiser, 21 January 1953, Bodleian Library,
MacNeice Papers, Box 20.
9
2007), 455.
10
Louis MacNeice, Under the Sugar Loaf , The New Statesman 63.1633 (29 June
1962), 9489.

poets was an invaluable piece of work especially in a cultural sahara such as
this; while yr. quiet criticism of our native bigotry and bogus Irishry was
excellently stated. As an enthusiast for yr. work and an Ulster rhymer myself
it was particularly gratifying to me to hear such opinions broadcast and to
hear Audens Spain praised.
I regret that you didnt repeat the lines on Craigavon from Iceland but
dont suppose this was possible. I may also add I was sorry that you didnt
know my poem Ireland (Listener 1932; reprinted in Poems of Tomorrow)
which, I think, takes up much the same line with regard to national
isolation.11
Hewitt enclosed a copy of Ireland (1932), a revised version of which was
later placed at the front of his Collected Poems 19321967 (1968).12
Speaking for and to We Irish, Ireland sets about contesting the truisms
of an isolationist Irish national identity, invoked in the opening lines echo
of the loose translation of Sinn Fin as ourselves alone: We Irish pride
ourselves as patriots. The Irish are not native here or anywhere, but
merely the Keltic wave that broke over Europe. The counselling against
love of usual rock and call to the seas great tidal movements round the
earth at the poems close advocates a move away from national isolation
towards socialist internationalism. However, even as it ostensibly tries to
do otherwise, and in contrast to Hewitts claim of solidarity with Mac-
Neice, the poem points back towards racial character too. In her essay on
The Poetics of Celt and Saxon, Edna Longley highlights Hewitts Ire-
land as belonging to the inherited scenario of the Celt/Saxon dialectic,
arguing that the poem tries to reconcile Celtic and Saxon-minded
Ireland by representing the Celt as mobile rather than beached on the
fringe.13 In the context of the 1930s political moment, highlighted by the
terms of Hewitts letter, Ireland also tries to reconcile the Celt to socialist
internationalism. However, in its attempts to be inclusive in speaking as
We Irish and identifying with the Keltic wave, the poem claims to write
11
Hewitt to Louis MacNeice, 12 July 1939, Bodleian Library, MacNeice Papers, Box
14. There is no evidence of a reply to Hewitt among the various collections of MacNeices
papers examined or the collection of correspondence received by Hewitt that is held at the
Public Record Ofce of Northern Ireland. Jonathan Allison, editor of MacNeices selected
correspondence, is also unaware of any such letter. The quotation on Craigavon referred to
is from Auden and MacNeice: Their Last Will and Testament: Item, to Craigavon that
old bull | With a horses face we leave an Orange drum | For after-dinner airs, when he feels
full (W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland (1937; rev. edn, London:
Faber and Faber, 1967), 22850: 233).
12
First published in The Listener (18 May 1932), collected in John Hewitt, Collected
Poems 19321967 (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968), repr. in The Collected Poems of
John Hewitt, ed. Frank Ormsby (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1991), 58.
13
Edna Longley, The Poetics of Celt and Saxon, in Poetry and Posterity (Newcastle:
Bloodaxe, 2000), 5289: 645.

from within a shared racial identity, arguing that a truer understanding of
this races past will lead to a more internationalist outlook. It draws on a
racial myth to subvert the nationalist myth; while the speaker in the poem
rejects identication as a native of any particular place, he seeks kinship
with a particular race.
Hewitts argument is posited on the poetic persona being at one with
the Irish in a way that then allows him to criticize a misconception of
Ireland. As Frank Ormsby argues, his identication with the Irish and his
portrayal of them as primarily Celtic indicates that he has not yet begun to
consider in any depth the complexities of ancestry and identity which
inform some of his best and best-known poems.14 But this desire to speak
to some form of identiable community points forwards to the regional
identity that Hewitt started to advocate as a basis for Ulster literature in
the 1940s, an identication at the centre of many of his best and best-
known poems, ironically rooted in love for usual rock. Despite the
apparent distance between Hewitts and Higginss views, they draw on a
similar ethnographic paradigm. Hewitt is trying to operate within the
racial rhythm, as Higgins claims Irish writers must do.15 Furthermore,
the regionalist ideas that Hewitt was soon to adopt do not straightfor-
wardly stand in opposition to Higginss proclamations. As Longley notes,
for all his wariness of the Anglo-Irish (which extends to a suspicion of
high style) Hewitt must have modelled his Ulster regionalism on the
Revival as well as on Scottish and Welsh literary Nationalism (themselves
indebted to the Irish example).16 In contrast, MacNeice concedes during
his radio exchange that: I am so little used to thinking of poetry in terms
of race-consciousness that no doubt it was very good for me.17
This inadvertent sympathy between Hewitt and Higgins is emphasized
by A Plea, which ends Higginss third collection The Dark Breed
(1927).18 The poem is directed at poets by a speaker later revealed to
be Ireland: Although the harps are still and wine is out, | I have a lip of
wine to heal all drought. This wine turns out to be a confused metaphor
for the song-restoring effects of the richness of the Irish landscape. Poets
14
Frank Ormsby, Introduction, in Collected Poems of John Hewitt, xlvii.
15
MacNeice and Higgins, Tendencies in Modern Poetry, 185.
16
Edna Longley, Defending Irelands Soul: Protestant Writers and Irish Nationalism
after Independence, in The Living Stream, 13049: 147. On regionalisms suppressed
continuities with cultural nationalism and revivalist modes, see: Richard Kirkland, The
Poetics of Partition: Poetry and Northern Ireland in the 1940s, in Fran Brearton and Alan
Gillis, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012), 21024: 21213; John Goodby, Irish Poetry since 1950: From Stillness into History
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 1112.
17
18
F.R. Higgins, The Dark Breed: A Book of Poems (London: Macmillan, 1927), 645.

are directed to the seashore, from my wild lip take each tidal treasure,
whose tides have washed with music though the harp of Finn; they are
instructed to Look up! the hounds are out and swift black horses | Have
stript new glens and hoofed the mountain grasses | Chasing slow daylight
over Muckish Mor. In the nal stanza, the speaker reveals him or herself
to be Ireland: I am Ireland, | Grown old and ashen with a touch of dawn!
This call to praise appears to be at odds with Hewitts assertion in Ireland
to look beyond Irelands shores. Despite the passing of the Gaelic way of
lifeimplied by the still harps and the nal image of an Ireland grown
old and ashen, and mourned more explicitly in the volumes preceding
poemsHiggins offers up Ireland as still worthy of praise. The nal
touch of dawn refers back to the Celtic Twilight of the 1890s, empha-
sizing that the country is still rich with cultural potential in terms of the
mythology and landscape explored in the early years of the Revival.
The opposition between Hewitts plea to look outwards to the rest of
the world and Higginss plea to look inwards to Ireland should not mask
the poems similarities. Both are claiming to speak on behalf of Ireland and
attempting to encapsulate it. They are working within a model as regards
the poets proper relationship with Ireland that can also be seen in Yeatss
work. We Irish is used by Yeats in The Statues, a late poem. It was a
phrase previously familiar from his prose, following his discovery of it in
George Berkeleys Commonplace Book.19 The we of We Irish also echoes
the we arrived at in the nal stanza of Easter 1916, We know their
dream, and the we returned to at various points in Nineteen Hundred
and Nineteen: We too had many pretty toys when young. The licence to
speak for all of Ireland occurs earlier in To Ireland in the Coming Times:
Know that I would accounted be | True brother of a company | That sang,
to sweeten Irelands wrong, Ballad and story, rann and song.20 More
starkly still, Patrick Pearses Mise ire, originally written in Irish in 1912
and included by Yeats in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) in a
translation by Lady Gregory, asserts: I am Ireland.21 Yeatss poems often
make the problems of trying to write in such terms central to their own
procedures. Hewitts Ireland, in its dismissal of the Irish landscape and
19
The Modern Irish intellect was born more than two hundred years ago when
Berkeley dened in three or four sentences the mechanical philosophy of Newton, Locke
and Hobbes, the philosophy of England in his day, and I think of England up to our day,
and wrote after each, We Irish do not hold with this, or some like sentence (W.B. Yeats,
The Child and the State (1925) in W.B. Yeats, Uncollected Prose, ed. John P. Frayne and
Colton Johnson (London: Macmillan, 1975), II, 458.
20
The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach
(London: Macmillan, 1957), 3914, 42833, 1379.
21
W.B. Yeats, ed., The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1936), 36.

belittling of the heroism of defeat, also undermines other nationalist
agendas. What Higgins, Hewitt, Yeats, Pearse, and many other Irish
poets of this period share, though, is a certain standpoint: whether in
praise or in criticism, the poet writes from, by, of, to, and for the Irish
people.22 Even in trying to challenge nationalist agendas, Hewitt per-
forms a particular role. He does not imagine a different relationship
between the poet and Ireland, rather he continues the same relationship
from a critical viewpoint, identifying himself with a Keltic wave of which
he is not, straightforwardly, a part.
Similar difculties recur in W.R. Rodgerss Ireland, published in his
rst collection Awake! and Other Poems (1941):
O these lakes and all gills that live in them,
These acres and all legs that walk on them,
These tall winds and all wings that cling to them,
Are part and parcel of me[.]23
As Darcy OBrien notes, Rodgerss Ireland echoes back to Yeatss To
Ireland in the Coming Times, as well as to the refrain of I am of
Ireland.24 Rodgers is claiming Yeatss licence to assert I am of Ireland,
and reorientating that authority to include himself, a Northern Irish
Presbyterian, and to praise the landscape of the north-east of Ireland:
the mountains of Mourne that turn and trundle | Roundly like slow coils
of oil along the shore | Of Down. Such exuberant descriptions suggest
that this northern landscape is as wild and mythically atmospheric as
anything in the west. As Peter McDonald observes, however, there is
something outlandish about this putting-on of a composed identity in the
poem and of a degree of licence which the poetry, with its irritating
verbal play, simply has not earned.25
During the summer of 1939, MacNeice was involved in thinking about
Ireland and its poetry through his research for The Poetry of W.B. Yeats
(1941), but he was also physically there. Following the broadcast with
Higgins, MacNeice returned to Ireland with his friend Ernst Stahl in mid-
August, visiting Dublin and staying with his family, who had rented a
holiday home in Cushendun, County Antrim, before heading west.
22
Talbot Press, 1916), viii.
23
W.R. Rodgers, Collected Poems, with an introductory memoir by Dan Davin
(London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 423.
24
Variorum Yeats, 5267; Darcy OBrien, W.R. Rodgers (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univer-
sity Press, 1970), 27.
25
Peter McDonald, Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1997), 30.

MacNeice and Stahl were in Galway when news arrived that Germany had
invaded Poland and they promptly drove to Dublin, where Stahl travelled
on to England.26 MacNeice stayed, spending the next day drinking with
Dublins literati who, as he recollects in The Strings are False, hardly
mentioned the war but debated the correct version of Dublin street songs.
The day after, he attended the All-Ireland hurling nal, talk of escapism,
I thought, mistaking Kilkenny, in their orange and black, for Kerry.27 He
then remained in Ireland for several months, moving between Belfast and
Dublin, before travelling to the United States in January 1940.28
This was the longest period that MacNeice had spent in Ireland since
his childhood. Critical accounts have focused on his ambivalent attitude to
the war at the time: in a surviving letter from November 1939, he
wondered if it was his war and he only nally returned to England to
join the war effort at the end of 1940.29 But MacNeices ve months in
Ireland represent more than just a phase in a longer interlude of indeci-
siveness. Putting his later choices to one side, it is clear that he was not just
in Ireland, but becoming involved in its cultural life. The Strings are False
mentions meeting Jack Yeats and the former Irish revolutionary-turned-
writer Ernie OMalley in Dublin, and the artist George MacCann in
Belfast.30 MacCann and his wife Mercy Hunter, also an artist, went on
to provide a link between MacNeice and Belfasts cultural circles for the
rest of his life; part of the time MacNeice and his family spent in Mayo in
the summer of 1945 was at OMalleys home.31 This was also the period
in which MacNeice beguiled Higgins away from the Abbey [ . . . ] to meet
other poets.32 MacNeice even submitted a play to the theatre in 1939,
26
27
Louis MacNeice, The Strings are False: An Unnished Autobiography (1965; London:
Faber and Faber, 1982), 212. MacNeice lists Higgins, Brinsley MacNamara, and Seamus
OSullivan as his Dublin drinking companions on 2 September in: Louis MacNeice,
notebook of varied notes, c. 1940, Harry Ransom Center, (MacNeice, L.) Misc., Hanley
II. My thanks to Terence Brown for pointing out MacNeices ignorance of GAA colours.
28
29
MacNeice to E.R. Dodds, 19 November [1939], in Letters of Louis MacNeice, ed.
Jonathan Allison (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 3667; Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice,
2856. Considerations that foreground MacNeices conicted mindset at the wars start
include: Peter McDonald, Louis MacNeices War, in Tim Kendall, ed., The Oxford
Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007),
37797; Richard Danson Brown, Neutrality and Commitment: MacNeice, Yeats, Ireland
and the Second World War, Journal of Modern Literature 28.3 (2005), 10929; Terence
Brown, Louis MacNeice and the Second World War, in Kathleen Devine, ed., Modern
Irish Writers and the Wars (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1999), 16577.
30
MacNeice, Strings are False, 21315.
31
Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice, 394, 335.
32
MacNeice, Under the Sugar Loaf , 9489.

though it was never performed.33 He was not only in Belfast and Dublin
but involved in the literary life of both cities and the effects of thinking
about Yeats while drinking with Irish writers can be traced in his poetry
from the period.
Indeed that poetrys rst publishing outlet itself highlights such a
context to its production. On 1 September, the day that Germany invaded
Poland, Higgins and the recently widowed George Yeats met in their
capacity as joint editors of the Cuala Press. The minutes, written by
George, record that: Mr. Higgins was requested to enquire from Mr.
MacNeice if he would have a book of poems.34 Writing for permission to
T.S. Eliot, his editor at Faber, MacNeice explained that he would like to
do it for the sake of someone connected with the press who has done a lot
for me.35 This was presumably Higgins who by the end of the month was
able to tell Elizabeth (Lolly) Yeats, who oversaw the working of the Press,
that he had received the manuscript, although MacNeice still wished to
make some few alterations, and to consult Mr. Higgins about the title.36
The book appeared in June 1940 (after Lollys death) as The Last Ditch
following sequentially on from the Presss posthumous publication of
Yeatss Last Poems and a volume of poems by Oliver St John Gogarty,
and preceding one by Donagh MacDonagh.37 MacNeices collection
contains the sequence The Coming of War, written during the previous
August and September. This offers a diary-like response to the developing
international situation, mediated through his experience of travelling
through different parts of Ireland. As originally printed in The Last
Ditch, however, before later being cut, it also engages extensively with
modern Irish poetry, exploring Ireland as a set of poetic possibilities in the
face of the imminent conict.38
Dublin, the rst poem in the sequence, acknowledges that: This was
never my town [ . . . ] and she will not | Have me alive or dead.39
33
Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice, 2667. Blacklegs: A Play [1939] was printed in Oxford
Poetry 4.1 (Spring 2000).
34
Entry for 1 September 1939, Minute Book of Directors Meetings, Trinity College
Dublin, Cuala Press Archive, 2.1.
35
Louis MacNeice to T.S. Eliot, 14 September [1939], in Letters of Louis MacNeice, 3545.
36
Entry for 25 September 1939, Minute Book of Directors Meetings, Trinity College
Dublin, Cuala Press Archive, 2.1.
37
W.B. Yeats, Last Poems and Two Plays (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1939); Oliver St John
Gogarty, Elbow Room (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1939); Donagh MacDonagh, Veterans and
Other Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1941).
38
The sequence was originally made up of ten poems in The Last Ditch (Dublin: Cuala
Press, 1940). It was shortened to seven poems (omitting II, IV, and V) when reprinted in
Plant and Phantom (1941) and retitled The Closing Album and cut to ve poems
(omitting VIII and IX) in Collected Poems 19251948 (1949).
39
MacNeice, Collected Poems, 6801.

MacNeice takes on the role of tourist but his estrangement from the city
forms part of a complex performance in relation to Yeatss Easter 1916.
As McDonald notes, Dublin recalls Yeatss poem through its metre, its
imagery of stone and water, and its equivocal attitude to the historical
characters who harden into gures of national myth (OConnell, Grat-
tan, Moore).40 MacNeices alienation from Dublin is implicitly con-
trasted with Yeatss identications in Easter 1916, where he reveals that
he knew the leaders of the Easter Rising and assumes the right to speak for
Ireland in moving from I to we in the poems nal stanza. MacNeice
allies his alienation to discrepancies in Dublins identity. The city is seedy
yet elegant, glamorous yet squalid, and neither an Irish nor English
town. To these contradictions are added the citys forgetfulness of its
recent past: The bullet on the wet | Streets [ . . . ] The Four Courts
burnt. Easter 1916 considers a moment when Dublin was the stage
for revolutionary tumult, but passes over the violent details. Yeatss poem
moves from the particularities of his Dublin life, walking Dublins streets,
exchanging a mocking tale at the club, to the present and future
national signicance of the martyred rebels. MacNeices Dublin compli-
cates any such consolatory shift towards a national perspective by taking a
longer view and declaiming the architectural incarnations of Dublins
more distant pasts: Fort of the Dane, | Garrison of the Saxon, | Augustan
capital. Echoing Yeatss listing of the rebel leaders names, MacDonagh
and MacBride | And Connolly and Pearse, this mongrel genealogy,
which, as Longley notes, resembles MacNeices own, is ironically played
off against Dublins use in Easter 1916 as the setting for a central event in
Irelands national story.41 In contrast to Yeats, the speaker in Dublin,
despite the passing resemblance, resists identifying himself with the city.
The poem articulates but does not try to resolve Dublins distinct and not-
altogether-Irish identity. A city that once made national history is recon-
gured as the embodiment of wider extra-national forces, while also being
at a remove from the historical moment at hand. As Richard Danson
Brown argues, MacNeices poem suggests that the conict underlying
Easter 1916 is irretrievably historical.42 Yeatss heroic nationalism and
the position of national poet he assumes are, in August 1939, rendered
inadequate by the impending international conict.
40
Variorum Yeats, 3914; Peter McDonald, Louis MacNeice: The Poet in his Contexts
41
Edna Longley, Louis MacNeice: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 1988),
27. See also Edna Longley, Yeats and Modern Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013), 1812.
42
Danson Brown, Neutrality and Commitment, 120.

That history is not now unfolding in Dublin is further underlined by
MacNeices reworking of Yeatss symbolism of stone and water. Easter
1916 recognizes that the rebels have changed utterly the state of Ireland.
Denis Donoghue remarks, more generally, that Yeats responded to life
when it had reached the pitch of denition.43 In MacNeices Dublin
such a moment of intensity would appear to be at hand, as suggested by
the sequences title The Coming of War. But stone and water, rather
than symbolizing antithetical kinds of change, are both merely grey.
Echoing Yeatss meeting of the future rebels among Dublins grey |
Eighteenth-century houses and in dramatic contrast to Yeatss nal
evocation of wherever green is worn, Dublins greyness no longer
bears the crop of national remembrance but has merely run to ower.
The stone, the water, and their greyness come to symbolize Dublins
distance from the moment of denition at hand.
A distinction is being made in MacNeices poem between the impos-
sibility of retracing a particular Yeatsian path, that of national poet, and
the enduring sufciency of Yeatss formal and stylistic resources. The
similarity McDonald notes of the metre in Dublin to the characteristic-
ally Yeatsian three- or four-stressed line in Easter 1916 offers more than
just a means by which to recall and therefore revise the imagery and
thematic content of Yeatss poem.44 By the end of Dublin this short
lines poetic possibilities come to the fore, allowing MacNeice a moments
poise in which to contain, without the obligation to unify or explain, the
citys disparate identities, as Dublin itself only holds but does not resolve
MacNeices mind, offering time for thought in the face of the calamities
to come. The value of the poems formal jugglers trick and of Yeatss
methods are further implied by the refrain-like, and therefore Yeats-like,
reconguration of the poems rst line, Grey brick upon brick, in its last,
And brick upon grey brick. Balanced against the implied contrast with
Yeatss use of stone and water as symbols of antithetical change in Easter
1916 is a sense of these grey bricks (suggested in part by their presence in
such a consciously formal device as this closing refrain-like repetition) as
symbolic of the space the poems form has allowed for its speaker to
register his particular impressions of Dublin in the face of historys
destructive pressures. Such ironies of form reect MacNeices critical
struggles with Yeats in The Poetry of W.B. Yeats. In the context of the
arrival of war, the studys introduction collapses the distinction between
Yeatss supposed escapism and the realism advocated by MacNeice and his
contemporaries through the 1930s: For war spares neither the poetry of
43
Denis Donoghue, Yeats (rev. edn, Glasgow: Fontana, 1971), 29.
44

Xanadu nor the poetry of pylons. The qualied defence of Yeats that
emerges rests partly on the spiritual nature of poetic form, as part of
MacNeices embrace of a qualied mysticism: artistic form is more than a
mere method or convenience or discipline or, of course, dcor.45
A disentangling of Yeatss present usefulness seems to occur in the
seventh poem of The Coming of War, later retitled Galway.46 Danson
Brown describes it as haunted by Yeatss cadence and MacNeices sense
that there is something in common between the subtle colour and
movement of his verse and that western landscape. Noting further
echoes in the numbering of swans (to Yeatss The Wild Swans at
Coole) and evocation of a symbolic moon, Danson Brown writes that
MacNeices poem dramatizes the consciousness of the threat to poetry
present in the opening page of The Poetry of W.B. Yeats: As soon as
I heard on the wireless of the outbreak of war, Galway became unreal. And
Yeats and his poetry became unreal.47 Dramatic tension comes from the
deation of Yeatsian descriptions of the western scene by the use of a
distinctly Yeatsian refrain, The war came down on us here, rediscovering
value in Yeatss methods at the moment when they seem to be rendered
untenable. Similarly, the poem raises itself up from the rather thirties-poet
descriptions of Galways urban degradation, The hollow grey houses, |
The rubbish and sewage, reminiscent of MacNeices Birmingham, to the
Yeatsian apocalyptic heights of the nal stanza, as the poem travels across
Galway Bay to County Clare: But Mars was angry | On the hills of Clare.
Danson Brown observes that the poems ending recalls Yeatss The Stares
Nest by My Window from Meditations in Time of Civil War, but nds
a point of divergence.48 The we in Yeatss nal stanza, We had fed the
heart on fantasies, attempts to encompass all those affected by the war,
whereas MacNeices poem
has a more muted sense of community. The war came down on us here, but
the poem does not identify the subjects hidden by that pronoun [ . . . ] the
division between the speaker and Galway itself is palpable: that us separates
the war-preoccupied tourists from the strangely depopulated city.49
As MacNeice draws tonally close to Yeatss response to war, he cannot
identify himself with Ireland. The bardic We Irish standing behind
45
Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (London: Oxford University Press, 1941),
2, 4.
46
47
Danson Brown, Neutrality and Commitment, 118; MacNeice, Poetry of W.B. Yeats,
12.
48
49
Danson Brown, Neutrality and Commitment, 11819.

Yeatss we in The Stares Nest, the we that is taken on by Higgins,
Hewitt, and Rodgers, is unavailable. The war that MacNeice is concerned
with lies beyond Ireland, forming a barrier between him and the locations
he visits. Moreover, MacNeice has afliations to those who stand
beyond We Irish, such as to Stahl, to his other friends in England
and to Eleanor Clark, the American addressee of several of the sequences
poems.
As The Coming of War unfolds, it is not only Yeatss poetical terrain
that is explored. In the fth poem, the speaker is travelling south-west:
Running away from the War,
Running away from the red
Pillar-box and the stamps
Bearing Georges head.50
These opening lines, through their insistent repetition, ballad-like (abcb)
alternating rhymes (red and head), and use of simple three- and four-
stress rhythms, partly inhabit the world of song and cast a kind of spell,
driving the poem beyond the signs of Britishness in Northern Ireland that
are a reminder of the imminent war. Initially, the metre of this song-like
poem seems militaristic, as the poem marches to the beat of the drum in
the Black North from which the speaker is escaping. But this thumping
beat is subtly undermined by the Irish place names, Dungannon,
Augher, Clogher, in the poems third stanza. The point of rhythmic
stress becomes less pronounced and the resultant wavering rhythm nds a
mimetic correlative in the poets admission that he is hoping to escape by
hiding his head | In the clouds of the West.
This association between escapism from the war, the west of Ireland,
and a less urgent kind of poetic rhythm is furthered in the sequences next
poem. It recasts the preceding poems rhyme scheme into an altogether
more relaxed metre, as the countryside of Sligo and Mayo is leisurely
described:
In Sligo the country was soft; there were turkeys
Gobbling under sycamore trees
And the shadows of clouds on the mountains moving
Like browsing cattle at ease.51
On arriving in the west, MacNeice adopts a set of distinctively Irish poetic
procedures in this transformed ballad-like stanza. The setting, the mean-
dering rhythm, and the rhyme scheme all recall the verse of the Revival
50 51

and its aftermath, including the early poetry of Higgins, such as Old
Galway from his 1925 collection Island Blood:
Far in a gardens wreckage,
Stark in the wind-cleared moon,
Grandees on wave-green marble
Of Connemara stone,
Gleam down the courtly pavings,
Where windfalls are strewn
Tripping steps led by the stringsmen
Thumbing an old tune.52
MacNeices poem also shares Higginss rich use of assonance: in its
opening stanza, the vowel sound in the rst lines soft returns in the
second lines gobbling, a pattern then repeated in the third and fourth
lines with clouds and browsing; and a similar pattern can be seen in
Old Galway between gardens and stark, marble, and Connemara.
Through such patterns, Higginss verse attempts loosely to reproduce the
formal procedures of Irish-language poetry in English-language poetry.
Higgins in Old Galway seems to be mimicking the Great Quatrain,
Rannaigecht Mr, which in terms of its principal rhyme scheme may not
seem to differ essentially from the popular English ballad measure, but
does differ through complex patterns of internal rhyme and consonance.53
Furthermore, in using a spread sense of rhythmic stress, Higgins is
following the poet and Easter 1916 rebel leader Thomas MacDonaghs
contention in Literature in Ireland (1916) that the Irish Mode in English-
language poetry is differentiated by a tendency to give, in certain poems,
generally of short riming lines, almost equal stress value to all the syllables,
a tendency to make the line the metrical unit.54
Of MacNeices critics, only Robin Skelton has discussed at any length
his use of the techniques associated with Irish-language poetry. Finding
patterns of assonance, alliteration, and internal rhyme in poems outside of
this sequence, Skelton speculates that though MacNeice did not know
Gaelic, it is unlikely that one so sensitive to speech-tunes and so interested
in metrics, would not have picked up something of Irish verse in his many
visits to the West.55 The considerable body of revivalist poetry in English
52
F.R. Higgins, Island Blood (London: John Lane, 1925), 1516.
53
Charles W. Dunn, Celtic, in W.K. Wimsatt, ed., Versication: Major Language Types
(New York: Modern Language Association, 1972), 139.
54
Talbot Press, 1916), 73.
55
Robin Skelton, Celt and Classicist: The Versecraft of Louis MacNeice, in Terence
Brown and Alec Reid, eds, Time was Away: The World of Louis MacNeice (Dublin: Dolmen
Press, 1974), 4353: 45.

already written in the Irish mode, however, seems a more likely point of
stylistic inuence. Indeed, an anonymous reviewer for The Dublin Maga-
zine (quite possibly Austin Clarke) seems clearly to perceive this in
pejoratively describing MacNeice in The Last Ditch as operating as a
tourist in the Irish mode.56 More positively, MacNeice in The Coming
of War might be read as exploring the value of the search for such a mode.
In this sixth poem of the sequence, Higginss Irish Mode, like the west of
Ireland it so often depicts, does not offer an enduring route of escape from
the coming war. Portents of death intrude upon this western setting and
Irish song-like verse:
And pullets pecking the ies from around the eyes of heifers
Sitting in farmyard mud
Among hydrangeas and the falling ear-rings
Of fuchsias red as blood.
Besides the hints at violence in the description of the pullets pecking the
ies and the fuchsias red as blood, the very rhyme between mud and
blood echoes Wilfred Owens Apologia pro Poemate Meo.57 This
suggests that Irish poetry may not be able to escape the impact of
the impending re-run of the Great War. In the next stanza, the speaker
turns from this disquieting scene to picturesque descriptions of Mayos
tumbledown walls. But when night falls at the close of the poem, the turf-
stacks rise ominously against the darkness | Like the tombs of nameless
kings. Sligo and Mayo do more than icker from milkmaid pastoral [ . . . ]
to less Arcadian prospects, as Longley suggests.58 Particular Irish poetic
possibilitiesHigginss style and the Revivals preoccupation with the
westare inhabited and challenged by these hints of coming death.
The eighth poem in the sequence, in visiting the ruined monastery of
Clonmacnoise, similarly revisits ground already given poetic expression in
T.W. Rollestons well-known anthology piece The Dead at Clonmac-
noise, as well as in Austin Clarkes poem Pilgrimage (1929).59 The
romanticizing historicism of much Irish verse is challenged by the arrival
of the European war. While Rolleston aggrandizes those buried at the
56
[Anon.], review of Louis MacNeice, The Last Ditch, The Dublin Magazine 15.4
(OctoberDecember 1940), 801.
57
I, too, saw God through mud, | The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches
smiled. | War brought more glory to their eyes than blood, | And gave their laughs more glee
than shakes a child (Wilfred Owen, The Complete Poems and Fragments, ed. Jon Stall-
worthy, 2 vols (London: Chatto and Windus, 1983), I, 124).
58
59
T.W. Rolleston, Sea Spray: Verse and Translations (Dublin: Maunsel, 1909), 47;
Austin Clarke, Collected Poems, ed. R. Dardis Clarke, intr. Christopher Ricks (Manchester:
Carcanet, 2008), 1512.

monastery, the warriors of Erin in their famous generations, and Clarke
evokes a medieval pilgrim encountering enlightened Christian learning,
Clonmacnoise was crossed | With light, MacNeice sees merely a huddle
of tombs and ruins of anonymous men that have to answer, like the
speaker, to the presents stupidity of men | Who cancel the voices of the
heart with barbarous noise | And hide the barren facts of death in censored
posts.60
Irish poetrys apparent escapism in the current historical circumstances
is being undermined in a complex response to Higginss accusation that as
an Irishman MacNeice cannot escape from his blood-music. Higginss
side of that debate was put in terms of poetic sound, as he talked of Racial
rhythm.61 MacNeice draws this aspect of their confrontation out further
in his book on Yeats. In a mini re-run of their broadcast, he recounts the
question of an Irish poet (surely Higgins), Do poets of your school never
sing?, commenting: His assumption was that a poet should sing rather
than think. MacNeice goes on to question this opposition between
thinking and singing in relation to Yeatss Crazy Jane poems.62 He also
challenges the terms of Higgins and Yeatss denunciation of Train to
Dublin in the preface to the 1935 series of Broadsides, as discussed in
Chapter 1.63 In the sixth poem of The Coming of War, MacNeice
implies that Higginss mode, for all that it attempts to sing and place itself
beyond international currents, cannot escape the thought of war. In
contrast to the sequences use elsewhere of Yeats as a means to confront
the present crisis, MacNeice challenges Higginss notion of Yeatss legacy
to Irish poetry (itself in part moulded by Yeats). In The Coming of War,
the notions of thinking and singing in Irish poetry are reconnected, as
MacNeices poems nd, ironically, in Yeatss use of rhythm, cadence, and
refrain the means to form a response to the gathering crisis.
That MacNeice should eetingly put on Higginss singing robes points
to the education he received at this time about the stylistic particularities
of modern Irish verse. This is apparent in the section of The Poetry of
W.B. Yeats that compares Yeats to his Irish successors. MacNeice praises
the craft of several Irish poets, including Seumas OSullivan, Padraic
Colum, Joseph Campbell, Frank OConnor, Austin Clarke, and Higgins.
This is a product not only of the positive inuence of Yeats, MacNeice
60
61
62
63
F.R. Higgins and W.B. Yeats, Anglo-Irish Ballads in Broadsides: A Collection of Old
and New Songs (1935), repr. in W.B. Yeats, Prefaces and Introductions: Uncollected Prefaces
and Introductions by Yeats to Works by Other Authors and to Anthologies Edited by Yeats, ed.
William H. ODonnell (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 17581: 1801.

argues, but also the example of early Irish verses use of assonance,
alliteration, and internal rhyme. He also cites approvingly MacDonaghs
account of Anglo-Irish poetry as a genre distinct from English poetry due
to the more uniform stress over the syllables in its rhythms. As well as this
delineation of the Irish mode, MacNeice makes certain critical judge-
ments. He argues that Colum and Campbell can at times be accused of
facile prettiness. In contrast, early Irish poetry appears to have combined
two virtues usually divorced, to have been unusually elaborate in pattern
and at the same time to have been direct and clear-cut. He also praises
OConnor and Higgins in his later verse for having realized, under the
inuence of Synge, that it is more important for their poetry to be strong
than to be pretty.64 Within the forging of an Irish mode in English-
language poetry, MacNeice differentiates (in an admittedly rather crude
polarization) between a strain that is somewhat sentimental and a more
matter-of-fact, hard, and direct poetry, which is truer to the manner of
early Irish lyric and more aesthetically successful. This relates to his earlier
discussion in The Poetry of W.B. Yeats of how in trying to avoid the
materialism of the Saxon, Yeats had misrepresented the genius of the
Gael by following Matthew Arnolds famous description of the Celts as in
revolt against the despotism of fact. MacNeice argues that this is not
borne out by early Irish poetry, citing MacDonaghs description of Irish
lyric as clear, direct, gem-like, and hard, as well as the materialism,
cruelty, and hardness found in OConnors translations from the Irish,
such as this quatrain from Devil, Maggot and Son:
Three things seek my death,
Hard at my heels they run
Hang them, sweet Christ, all three
Devil, maggot and son.65
The ninth poem in The Coming of War strives towards this notion of
a harder and more direct version of the Irish mode.66 Recasting a ballad-
like quatrain once again (abcb), it operates in ironic counterpoint to the
sixth poems escapism and descriptions of landscape. Its rst and last
quatrains undercut initial prettiness, the sky is a lather of stars, with
the recognition in the Yeats-like refrain that nothing can drive the war
64
65
Ibid., 479; Frank OConnor, The Fountain of Magic (London: Macmillan, 1939),
32. Declan Kiberd suggests an earlier possible connection between the Gaelic lyric Cill Cais,
recently translated by OConnor as Kilcash, and the lament for the cutting down of trees
on Primrose Hill in Autumn Journal (1939) (Declan Kiberd, Incorrigibly Plural: Louis
MacNeice, Irish Classics (London: Granta, 2000), 54355: 551).
66

away. Furthermore, in the middle quatrain, the landscape itself is oppres-
sive: The black horns of the headlands | Grip my gullet tight. A bleaker
mode has been found in which to confront the war now at hand. The
sequence has travelled from the point at which the speaker was trying to
run away from the War, to this admission that the war cannot be driven
away, and part of its journey has been through the literary territory of
contemporary Ireland, subtly inhabiting its locations and techniques.
* * *
Comparing MacNeice and Hewitt, Edna Longley notes that the Second
World War redened both poets concepts of the relation between poetry
and society. In Hewitts case a war spent in Belfast led to his championing
of Ulster regionalism; in wartime London, MacNeice found true com-
munity for the rst (and last) time.67 In The Strings are False, sailing back
to England in December 1940, MacNeice takes stock of his life:
I am 33 years old and what can I have been doing that I still am in a muddle?
But everyone else is too, maybe our muddles are concurrent. Maybe, if I look
back. I shall nd that my life is not just mine, that it mirrors the lives of the
othersor shall I say the Life of the Other?68
These concurrent muddles offer a point of common signicance that
denes but does not subsume the individual. In the London to which
he returned, MacNeice found a situation that offered fellowship with the
lives of others in the common defence of the life of the individual. In the
prose piece The Way We Live Now (1941), MacNeice untangles his
various allegiances before revealing renewed enthusiasm for the city:
I have never really thought of myself as British; if there is one country I feel at
home in, it is Eire. As a place to live in or write in I prefer the USA to England
and New York to London. But I am glad to be back in England and, in
particular, in London. Because London since the Blitz has become more
comprehensible. Because this great dirty, slovenly, sprawling city is a visible
and tangible symbol of freedom; it has not been centralized, organized,
rationalized, dehumanized into a streamlined ad for the cult of the State.69
London is a city of individuals, but it has made a collective response to the
Blitz in defence of such individualism. It was in the movement between
67
Edna Longley, Progressive Bookmen: Left-Wing Politics and Ulster Protestant
Writers, in The Living Stream, 10729: 121.
68
69
Louis MacNeice, The Way We Live Now, Penguin New Writing 5 (April 1941),
repr. in Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990),
7882: 82.

individual muddles and the hope that they may prove concurrent, as
McDonald argues, that MacNeice found a location for a good deal of his
subsequent wartime writing.70
Several poems in Springboard (1944), MacNeices primary poetic
response to wartime London, hold the individuals desires and a common
purpose in tension. In the title poem a lone man stands naked above
London ready to dive to his death:
He knew only too well
That circumstances called for sacrice
But, shivering there, spreadeagled above the town,
His blood began to haggle over the price
History would pay if he were to throw himself down.
The situation is concrete yet symbolically suggestive. It explores the
conicts between the central gures sacricial duty and his fears, his
own life and the fate of the world. Acknowledging that the circumstances
call for the individuals sacrice on behalf of a common good does not
preclude acknowledging that that good is some way short of any Utopia;
the cost to the individual will offer neither ransom or reprieve to the
other individuals that are the mans friends. Though the ironies and
doubts stack up, the poem nally knows, in an irresistibly matter-of-fact
manner, that we know he knows what he must do.71
It is Springboard s more programmatic failures, however, such as in
The Kingdom, that start to work in parallel to Hewitts regionalist
ideas.72 The poem celebrates in a discursive register the Kingdom of
Individuals, a notion that its opening section circles around with a
snowstorm of denitions: these are | Apart from those who drift and
those who force, | Apart from partisan order and egotistical anarchy, |
Apart from the easy religion of him who would nd in God | A boss, a
ponce, an alibi. With the exception of the seventh sectiona memorial to
the poets dead fatherthe sketches of the members of the kingdom that
follow remain hampered by this desire for explicit denition rather than
dramatic implication.
The Kingdom displays similar impulses to Hewitts long poem Free-
hold. Described by Longley as Hewitts verse-manifesto for regionalism,
this poem has a complicated publication history.73 A section was rst
published in the Dublin magazine The Bell in 1944, under the title
Townland of Peace, and the complete poem was then published in the
70
McDonald, Louis MacNeices War, 387.
71
72
Ibid., 2419. 73
Longley, Progressive Bookmen, 125.

Belfast miscellany Lagan in 1946.74 That version included a fth and nal
section entitled Roll Call, which was then excluded from the version of
the poem that Hewitt eventually published in book form in Freehold and
Other Poems (1986).75 Like much of MacNeices work of the period,
Freehold strives to accommodate the collective and the individual. It
outlines several unnamed people, including artists, poets, novelists, an
architect, and a country schoolmaster, before broadening its outlook to
praise more generalized gures: farmers daughters, sons [ . . . ] parish
chroniclers [ . . . ] the hiker. The poem proceeds to argue that through
these unwitting comrades moves a common purpose that is in tune with
his regionalist creed: to hoard the cherished past, to win a landskip equal
to the love | his heart is big with, and
to take the present for an urgent text
to draw an order out of, that the next
gay generation may not nd their house
cold and unfriendly and anonymous,
but rather know the lines that we have planned
as folk ways t for heart and head and hand
till joy and mercy again possess the land.
The details of Hewitts regionalist creed are at a remove from those of
MacNeices kingdom, with his talk of trying to offer folk ways for the
generations that follow, its emphasis on connection to a specic landskip
and its treasuring of the past, itself encapsulated in that archaic spelling of
landscape. But in admitting that it is a manifesto created in response to the
inheritance of a house cold and unfriendly and anonymous to a poetic
vocation, Roll Call does share ground with The Kingdom. Common to
both poems is a desire to seek individual denition through a collective
identity and so to nd a position (in Hewitts place literally, in MacNeices
metaphorically) from which to write, in the midst of a generally hostile
environment. Hewitt offers positive accounts of his comrades efforts, but
in Roll Call there are hints of the impoverished state of the culture and
society in Northern Ireland that they are trying to improve. One of the
gures is a scholar who has shown Hewitts generation where to nd | the
loyalties a people needs to live, but only its shrunk and battered roots
survive | in our thrawn mesh of time-lag and decay; while the land in
the section above is by implication not possessed of joy and mercy.
MacNeices poem is responding to a less geographically specic set of
74
John Hewitt, Townland of Peace, The Bell 9.1 (October 1944), 1012; John
Hewitt, Freehold, Lagan 4 (1946), 2344.
75
Collected Poems of John Hewitt, 4869.

conditions, but is even more clearly under siege from the dehumanizing
aspects of modernity, including not only the totalitarian forces threatening
wartime Britain, but also the pressures of capitalism, technology, and
science: salvation | By whip, brochure, sterilisation or drugs. The dates
do not allow for any direct relationship between the two poems in terms of
inuence or allusion: The Kingdom was dated c. 1943 in Springboard,
which was then published in 1944; while Roll Call, although published
in 1946, was written in 1942.76 As Longley suggests, though, MacNeices
developing conception of the relationship between the poet and the
community was bringing his poetry into close relation with Hewitts
regionalist concepts. In the poems written immediately after the war,
MacNeice also interacts with the methods and assumptions of his North-
ern Irish contemporaries, including Hewitt and Rodgers, in more specic
ways, which complicate Longleys sense of MacNeice and Hewitt sharing
a socialist consciousness of community.
On 5 April 1945 MacNeice and his family travelled to Northern
Ireland to stay with his stepmother outside Carrickfergus. He returned
to England for a few weeks at the end of the month but then rejoined his
family; they stayed in Ireland until the beginning of September.77 The trip
started out as a working holiday. MacNeice was given the job of grooming
new writers in Belfast and writing several radio scripts for the BBC.78 As
his letters to his boss Laurence Gilliam show, the holiday was then
extended into a longer sabbatical; in mid-June he decamped to Achill
Island, County Mayo, for several months.79 The sabbatical proved pro-
ductive. MacNeice wrote The Dark Tower, one of his nest radio plays,
and several of his poems about Ireland have their roots in the period.
These form a loose sequence at the centre of MacNeices 1948 volume
Holes in the Sky, labelled by McDonald as MacNeices Achill Poems.80
While some of these poems clearly respond to this setting in the west, it is
also signicant that during this period MacNeice was spending time in
76
Roll Call appears with the following comment in Hewitts notebook: Fragments of a
projected long poem, written 25.3.42, mislaid until 17.9.42 (Collected Poems of John
Hewitt, 657).
77
78
Laurence Gilliam, BBC Features Department memo, 3 August 1945, BBC Written
Archives, LI/285/2.
79
Louis MacNeice to Laurence Gilliam, 12 June and 14 July 1945, BBC Written
Archives, LI/285/2.
80
Peter McDonald, This mirror of wet sand: Louis MacNeices Achill Poems,
Agenda 43.23 (2008), 4657. A sequence of poems seems to run in Holes in the Sky
from Littoral to Western Landscape, all dated 1945 (some more specically as June or
July). Under the Mountain (undated) and No More Sea (October 1944), which follow,
share similar preoccupations, as does Woods (1946), a few poems later (MacNeice,
Collected Poems, 25969).

Northern Ireland and in the company of its writers, several of whom he
was mentoring for the BBC. One such was W.R. Rodgers, who a year later
moved to London to share an ofce with him. Another was the ction
writer Sam Hanna Bell, who became a radio producer in Belfast. Hanna
Bell later recollected that the three of them had been drinking together in
a Belfast pub when news arrived of the bombing of Hiroshima.81 This
had taken place on 6 August, so MacNeice must have left his family in
Achill and travelled back to Belfast for at least a few days. Such a detail of
his day-to-day movements points to his presence among the citys literati
during the summer of that yearan exposure reected in the poems he
wrote.
Through the war years, literary life in Northern Ireland had been
awakening. In a 1944 article on Ulster Outlooks in The Cornhill Maga-
zine, Tom Harrisson (a co-founder of Mass-Observation) observed that
the regions younger writers
are entering the initial stages of a creative consciousness, making the exciting
discovery that one can do good creative work without going near Cyril
Connolly or the Caf Royal. In particular, two anthologies, Lagan (Bally-
macash, Lisburn, 1943) and Northern Harvest (MacCord, Belfast, 1944),
both published in the past twelvemonth, are full of remarkably even, well
done poetry and prose, if much of it is at and quiet, in the Ulster way afraid
to start any strong emotion lest the old sores erupt again into religion or
troubles, which have to be ignored in the interests of unityand could not
have been ignored a few years back. No comparable area of England could do
a third as well.82
Subtitled A Collection of Ulster Writing, Lagan was an annual miscel-
lany that had been started in 1943 by Hewitt, Hanna Bell, John Boyd,
and Robert Davidson, and would run until 1946. In the rst issues
editorial, Boydwho also went on to work as a producer for BBC
Northern Irelanddeclares that the magazine aims to foster a literary
tradition springing out of the life and speech of this province.83 In the
rst issue, Roy McFaddens poem The Pattern reects this agenda in
dening the province and declaring the poet to be a product of its
pattern:
81
Barbara Coulton, Louis MacNeice in the BBC (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), 78.
82
Tom Harrisson, Ulster Outlooks, The Cornhill Magazine 962 (May 1944), 8091:
85. For Hewitts recollections of Harrisson and account of the emergence of regionalism in
the 1940s, see John Hewitt, A North Light: Twenty-Five Years in a Municipal Art Gallery,
ed. Frank Ferguson and Kathryn White (c. 19614; Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013),
14255.
83
John Boyd, Introduction, Lagan 1 (1943), 57: 6.

Out of these hills and erce, historic elds,
Out of this froth of trees and silent stretches
Of solitary soil where hurrying winds
Gossip and separate: out of this sky
Holding the island cupped to the ear of God:
Out of each clenched bush and sauntering river
Swaggering to sea: out of the frail
Flotsam of the shipwrecked centuries,
I speak, builded with their bone and anger.84
Similarly, the second issue contains an impressionistic prose portrait of
Belfast and its history by Denis Ireland that attempts to account for the
curious indeterminacy of the citys IrishBritishAmerican hybrid
character:
Belfast has, in fact, slipped again in its effort at synchronisation. It began by
being an Irish town, was shaped while still in its infancy by the inuences of
the American and French Revolutions, forgot its origins in the storm and
stress of the Industrial Revolution, and now, with grand-uncles portrait
hanging over a Sheraton sideboard in a red-brick terrace house in one of its
suburbs, is making desperate efforts to prove itself Britishan effort crys-
tallized in the new Portland-stone wedding cake of a City Hall and the
slogans chalked on the blank walls of its factories.85
MacNeice contributed The Godfather to the fourth and nal number of
Lagan in 1946. This also contained extracts from Rodgerss rst radio
script, City Set on a Hill, which MacNeice had produced in Belfast
in November 1945.86 Rodgerss piece, a portrait of Armagh and its
history, was very much in tune with the regionalist agenda of Lagan,
which had been stridently reiterated by Hewitt (a close friend of Rodgers)
in an essay entitled The Bitter Gourd: Some Problems of the Ulster
Writer, published in the 1945 issue. Hewitt argued that the Ulster writer
must be a rooted man, must carry the native tang of his idiom like the
native dust on his sleeve; otherwise he is an airy internationalist.87
MacNeice would appear to be that very airy internationalist, and in the
Irish poems in Holes in the Sky he complicates the very possibility of being
a rooted man.
84
Roy McFadden, The Pattern, Lagan 1 (1943), 69. On the regionalists repeated
writing of the poem-as-manifesto, see Kirkland, The Poetics of Partition, 21516.
85
Denis Ireland, Smoke Clouds in the Lagan Valley, Lagan 2 (1944), 2536: 34.
86
Louis MacNeice, The Godfather, and W.R. Rodgers, Armagh: The City Set on a
Hill, Lagan 4 (1946), 1319.
87
John Hewitt, The Bitter Gourd: Some Problems of the Ulster Writer, Lagan 3
(1945), repr. in Ancestral Voices: The Selected Prose of John Hewitt, ed. Tom Clyde (Belfast:
Blackstaff, 1987), 10821: 115.

Near the beginning of this loose sequence is Carrick Revisited. In
returning to his childhood home, MacNeice also returns to the earlier
Carrickfergus, from The Earth Compels (1937), a poem that charts his
move to and from Smoky Carrick as a boy, against the backdrop of the
towns history and topography.88 A contrast is drawn between the Scotch
quarter, a line of residential houses, and the Irish quarter, a slum for the
blind and halt: seventeenth-century names and cultural divides that by
the twentieth century map on to socio-geographic class divisions. The
beauty of the towns situation on Belfast Lough is juxtaposed with
polluting industrialization: The brook ran yellow from the factory stink-
ing of chlorine. The medieval Norman invader walled the town To stop
his ears to the yelping of his slave. Into a complicated site of past
invasions, migrations, religious and racial separations, as well as present-
day capitalist impositions and economic divisions, MacNeice places his
past self: I was the rectors son, born to the anglican order | Banned for
ever from the candles of the Irish poor. This ambiguous grouping by this
stage in the towns history, as David Fitzpatrick suggests, would seem to
encapsulate the profound class divisions within twentieth-century Ulster
Protestantism rather than some eternal contest between Protestant invader
and Catholic slave.89 Yet for all its descriptive subtlety, the poem mimics
a childs world view. There is a focus on the sensory perceptions of sight,
sound, and smell (hooting, clang, shining, stinking, yelping, and so
on) and the adult I never enters the poem to probe beneath the ambigu-
ous surfaces of its stately, tomb-like quatrains. Just as Carrickfergus is left
behind in the poem when the child travels to England to be schooled,
permanently displacing him from his childhood home, so the poet is at a
remove from his dream-like memories:
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.
In contrast, Carrick Revisited initially undercuts this distance, linking
the present poet, returning to the scene, to the astonished child. Despite
some changes, such as new villas and a sizzling grid, the green banks
and lough remain much as they were. Instead of offering roots, this
topographical frame starts to unsettle the poets sense of connection, as
he reects on the complications of time and location. Small distances are
88
89
David Fitzpatrick, Solitary and Wild: Frederick MacNeice and the Salvation of Ireland
(Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2012), 304.

opened up between the child he was and the place this was, and the man
and place they have become. The poet was and still is surprised to be in
Carrickfergus, which both is and is not the place where he was raised.
A random chemistry of soil and air has determined largely the channels
of his dreams, but memory does not straightforwardly form the poets
sense of self. Rather, memories further a sense of dislocation from the past
as they peer at him from a shelf and are only half-heard through boarded
time.90 In the The Bitter Gourd, Hewitt had written:
I do not mean that a writer ought to live and die in the house of his fathers.
What I do mean is that he ought to feel that he belongs to a recognisable
focus in place and time. How he assures himself of that feeling is his own
affair. But I believe he must have it. And with it, he must have ancestors. Not
just of the blood, but of the emotions, of the quality and slant of mind.91
In certain respects the speaker in Carrick Revisited appears to be heeding
Hewitts call, as he examines the extent to which he feels he belongs to a
recognisable focus in place and time. But he nds that he cannot assure
himself of a sense of belonging. Carrickfergus and the pasts that it is
associated with, rather than offering a point of stability, undermine the
self s unity. MacNeice complicates Hewitts assertions by teasing out
some of their conceptual difculties in the context of the facts of his
own experience.
A change in perspective to MacNeices ancestors in the penultimate
stanza of Carrick Revisited further emphasizes this instability:
Torn before birth from where my fathers dwelt,
Schooled from the age of ten to a foreign voice,
Yet neither western Ireland nor southern England
Cancels this interlude; what chance misspelt
May never now be righted by my choice.92
MacNeices father and mother were originally from the west of Ireland; his
fathers family had left Omey Island in Connemara in a sectarian dispute
when he was thirteen.93 So MacNeices early childhood in Carrickfergus is
framed by a deeper sense of dislocation originating in his familys roots in
the Irish west, as well as his own schooling in England. He has ancestors,
just not ones whose recognisable focus in place straightforwardly matches
his own. This forms a further riposte to Hewitts regionalist tenets, centred
90
MacNeice, Collected Poems, 2612. 91
Hewitt, The Bitter Gourd, 116.
92
93
David Fitzpatrick, I will acquire an attitude not yours: Was Frederick John
MacNeice a Home Ruler, and Why Does this Matter?, Field Day Review 4 (2008),
14055.

around the realities of chance and choice, as MacNeice reverses the
prestige conferred on roots by implying that he regards his roots in
Carrickfergus as something of a mistake. By contrast, in Hewitts Town-
land of Peace, published in The Bell in 1944, the speaker recollects
walking in the county of his kindred, and this landscape facilitates an
encounter with his fathers father who ran these roads | a hundred years
ago.94 Whereas MacNeices own memories of Carrickfergus are
estranged, Hewitt reconnects with his familys past presence in this
landscape, when his grandfather moves beside him as a comforting
quasi-ghost. The identication between Hewitts sense of self, his family,
and the landscape is presented as straightforward, stretching from his
grandfathers time to the present; but in several respects it is merely
imagined.
MacNeices nal image of his childhood interlude is a belated rock in
the red Antrim clay. This echoes a similar image in Hewitts Once Alien
Here, rst published, like The Bitter Gourd, in the 1945 issue of Lagan.
The poem again imagines the lives of Hewitts ancestors: Once alien here
my fathers built their house. The speaker juxtaposes these settlers with the
native Irish who gave the rain-pocked stone a meaning, but then appro-
priates this meaning in stone to proclaim himself now a part of this
landscape. That his ancestors are buried in Ulster clay and that Ulsters
rock is native to his thought allows him to seek to nd a mode in which
to tell | our stubborn wisdom individual. The poem offers a version of the
bard-like voice of Ireland, recast to speak on behalf of Ulster. It also
operates within a minstrelsy complex, underpinned by modes of thinking
that once again link race, blood, and land:
yet lacking skill in either scale or song,
the graver English, lyric Irish tongue,
must let this rich earth so enhance the blood
with steady pulse where now is plunging mood
till thought and image may, identied,
nd easy voice to utter each aright.95
MacNeice reworks Hewitts use of the words clay and rock in Carrick
Revisited. Rather than an identity underpinned by his ancestors buried in
this clay, or the regions rocks forming a part of his native thought,
MacNeices childhood interlude is itself a belated rock in the red Antrim
clay. In fact, this childhood is the poets only ancestor in the Antrim
94
Collected Poems of John Hewitt, 6423.
95
McLane, Balladering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry, 57; John
Hewitt, Once Alien Here, Lagan 3 (1945), repr. in Collected Poems of John Hewitt, 201.

earth: resistant and aloof to that present self in its stone-like state and
belated in that, contrary to Hewitts schema of belonging, it does not
make him a native and is not native to his thought.
This dialogue with Hewitt appears to continue in The Strand. It offers
an imaginary encounter with MacNeices dead father:
[ . . . ] my steps repeat
Someones who now has left such strands for good
Carrying his boots and paddling like a child,
A square black gure whom the horizon understood
My father.96
Rather than moving beside him as a friendly ghost, MacNeices father is
more complexly an echo in MacNeices own reection in the mirror of
wet sand. The son is mirroring the father but at an unbridgeable remove.
However, the poem is not merely dismissing the kind of relationship with
ones ancestors or the landscape that Hewitts work promotes. It is
exploring the limits of such relationships: the horizon understood his
father; the western Irish landscape formed him, such that he kept some-
thing in him solitary and wild; and the mountains on Achill fullled
him. But although the poem evokes the relationship of MacNeices father
with the landscape and, in terms of the poets own memory, the landscape
has become a synecdoche for his father, the possibility of this relationship
being open to MacNeice, as his fathers son, is not present.
Even his father was only a visitor and, although it is the ghost of his
father that imaginatively haunts this poem, it is MacNeice who is rendered
ghostly by his inability fully to belong in this location. His only claim to
keeping something in him of this island is through the memory of a
father who himself only carried something of this place. The usual
ghostly roles are reversed, as is mutedly echoed in the poems form. The
terza rima carries marks of Yeatss Cuchulain Comforted, as McDonald
notes, reinforcing the point that this is only an imagined and not an actual
resurrection.97 It also draws on The Divine Comedy, where Dante is
rendered ghostly to the gures he encounters in the afterlife. To turn
back to Hewitt, The Strand again uncovers complications as regards a
regionalist agenda through the exploration of MacNeices personal cir-
cumstances. Hewitt decrees in The Bitter Gourd that a poet should have
a native place.98 But in The Strand, as in Carrick Revisited, what might
have been that place turns out to be a source of estrangement. In a reversal
96
97
McDonald, MacNeices Achill Poems, 567.
98
Hewitt, The Bitter Gourd, 115.

of Hewitts Once Alien Here, we might label MacNeices two poems
Once Native Here or even Never Native Here.
At the end of the loose sequence in Western Landscape, MacNeice sets
out to honour the site of his fathers real and his wished-for roots.99
Romantically, the speaker initially describes the western climate as
Lethe and the smoky taste of cooking on turf as lotus, recalling Yeatss
The Wanderings of Oisin, as Longley notes.100 But as the poem pro-
ceeds, the landscapes implied indifference in The Strand is more
expressly stated. Whatever we desire, our afnity with such light and
line is merely temporary; cloud and rock are only relevant if they form
part of the poets permanence. At the poems end the speaker tries to
reconcile himself to this reality:
[ . . . ] let me, if a bastard
Out of the West by urban civilization
(Which unwished father claims meso I must take
What I can before I go) let me who am neither Brandan
Free of all roots nor yet a rooted peasant
Here add one stone to the indifferent cairn . . .
With a stone on the cairn, with a word on the wind, with a prayer
in the esh let me honour this country.
The speakers desire for attachment confronts the fact that he is a visitor,
who can merely offer something in token to this place. But looking at
Western Landscape in the context of MacNeices exposure to Belfasts
literary milieu in the summer of 1945 gives a word like rooted a specic
historical weight, related to the regionalist ideas put forward by Northern
Irish writers during the period. As Fran Brearton suggests, MacNeice in
this poem is undermining Hewitts dictum that the Ulster writer must be
a rooted man, by showing that he both might not be able to be rooted
and yet still might wish to add his tribute to the indifferent landscape.101
While set in the west, the poem tests some of regionalisms underlying
principles. Longley comments more generally of these Achill Poems that
their western landscapes function as a topography for metaphysical
inquiry.102 However, these metaphysical inquiries relate to the work
Hewitt and others in Northern Ireland were attempting to get poetry to
perform in the mid-1940s.
That these poems, Carrick Revisited aside, are written of a western
landscape is also a kind of conceit. It links revivalist attempts to nd
99 100
MacNeice, Collected Poems, 2657. Longley, Louis MacNeice, 30.
101
102

symbolic and transcendental meanings in the west of Ireland to an Ulster
regionalists attempts to nd nourishing roots in the countryside of the
North.103 The opening of Western Landscape self-consciously rests on
previous poetic representations. The descriptions of the Irish landscape in
the opening verse paragraphbroken bog with its veins of amber water
[ . . . ] the distant headland, a sphinxs st, that barely grips the sea [ . . . ]
the mitred mountain weeping shalereplicate the poetical terrain of
Yeats, as mentioned earlier, as well as of Higgins and other Irish poets
associated with the Revival. As discussed, MacNeice parodied such modes
of description in the sixth poem of The Coming of War. Heather Clark
identies the ironic use of revivalist motifs and themes in two earlier
poems from I Crossed the Minch, The Hebrides and Leaving Barra.104
In the wartime poem Neutrality, MacNeice also condemns Irelands
isolationist stance in relation to the war by evoking a distinctly literary
western landscape:
Look into your heart, you will nd a County Sligo,
A Knocknarea with for navel a cairn of stones,
You will nd the shadow and sheen of a moleskin mountain
And a litter of chronicles and bones.105
The Sligo locale and other terms in the poem recall Yeatsian myth-
mongering, as Clair Wills comments, implying more generally that
Yeatss mythical recreation of Ireland has overwhelmed realism and
responsibility.106 In Western Landscape, the mention of doggerel,
the assertion that the air is so soft that it smudges the words, and the
acoustic turbulence of the opening two verse paragraphsLollingly,
lullingly over-insidiously [ . . . ] Weavingly laughingly leavingly weep-
inglyseem to mock the descriptive and stylistic excesses of revivalist
verse. An effect of this overt interaction with past depictions of the west, in
the context of the more subtle interaction with the practices of Hewitts
regionalism throughout the loose sequence, is to reveal both poetical
positions as being based on similarly questionable attempts to read too
much signicance into a particular landscape and ones connection with it.
In foregrounding the limitations of his own attempts to honour this
country and the distortion such an exercise involves, MacNeice implicitly
103
So anticipating: Longley, The Living Stream, 147; Kirkland, The Poetics of Parti-
tion, 21213; Goodby, Irish Poetry since 1950, 1112.
104
Heather Clark, Leaving Barra, Leaving Inishmore: Islands in the Irish Protes-
tant Imagination, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 35.2 (Autumn 2009), 305: 32.
105
106
Clair Wills, That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland during the Second
World War (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 128.

questions any easy identications between poet and place, especially places
that they only visit as tourists from their homes among urban civilization.
The poem undermines the poetic ground shared by Higgins and Hewitt.
The nal symbol of Western Landscape, once again of stone, is
suggestive in this regard. The feeling of prenatal attachment to this
place, which leads to the poets attempts to honour this country, results
in just another stone on the indifferent cairn. As mentioned above, this
image underlines the landscapes indifference to the poet. The relation-
ships between the landscape, the cairn, and the stone also suggest that
MacNeices poem is only one of many such poetical attempts to connect
with the landscape, as his stone rests in a pile among other similar stones
cast on to this cairn. Indeed, the cairn might be taken as a symbol for the
combination of antiquarian interest and attachment to place that had
characterized so much Irish poetry of the preceding decades. Moreover,
the cairn is itself an interloper on the original landscape and ambiguously
discrete from it. The speaker is adding his stone to a cairn that is separate
from the landscape he is trying to honour and on a metaphorical level he is
contributing to an edice, a tradition, built up by other poets. But in the
nal line MacNeice denies his poem even this sense of connection. The
shift from a stone on the cairn to a word on the wind undercuts any
sense in which his poem may actually, like a stone, rest within this
landscape. It highlights that the speaker is, in literal terms, only putting
a stone on this cairn, whereas the poem, as mere words in the wind, is
more disconnected and transitory yet again in relation to this landscape.
Under the Mountain and No More Sea, the two poems that follow
Western Landscape in Holes in the Sky, partly frame the Achill Poems,
exploring the poets relationship to the past and to place in more overtly
philosophical and meta-poetical terms.107 A mini-parable on perspective,
Under the Mountain contrasts the sea, a eld, and a house when seen
from above with the view when you get down. From above, the sea and
the eld are picturesque (the eld is a ap and the haycocks buttons),
while the house appears devoid of life (a silent gadget whose purpose |
Was long since obsolete). From down below, the scene is less serene: the
breakers are cold scum and the eld actually has a working purpose. The
nal stanza offers a judgement upon this contrast:
And when you get down
The house is a maelstrom of loves and hates where you
Having got downbelong.
107

The you in these lines is difcult to place. But part of the audience being
addressed is surely poets who wish to romanticize what is seen from
above rather than engage with less pleasant realities. An aesthetic point
is being made: the appropriate position for the poet is among the messy
and the human.
The position of Under the Mountain in Holes in the Sky, following the
sequence of poems expressly concerned with Ireland, suggests that the
you this aesthetic point is addressed towards may, more specically, be
Irish poets. Indeed, the poems title opens up the possibility that this point
is being made in relation to Yeatss Under Ben Bulben and, in particular,
its advice to Irish poets in its fth section and its closing epitaph.108
MacNeices title is not in any straightforward sense an allusion to
Under Ben Bulben. For instance, MacNeices poem does not interact
with the eugenicist elements of Yeatss poem (Base-born products of base
beds) or its relation to the matter of poetic form (Sing whatever is well
made). Neither do the picturesque perspectives seen from above in
MacNeices poem map in any direct sense on to the gures (such as
Hard-riding country gentleman) about whom Yeats instructs Irish
poets to sing. Less concretely, though, the picture of Ireland that Yeatss
listing of character types implies does seem in play in Under the Moun-
tain, as does the epitaphs call to Cast a cold eye | On Life. Yeatss
assertion that Irish poets should scornfully stand aloof from the messiness
of the present and cast their minds on a decidedly Yeatsian conception of
Irelands past is opposed by MacNeices own assertion in Under the
Mountain that you belong among the presents maelstrom of difcul-
ties. In his study of Yeats, MacNeice writes that the moral of Under Ben
Bulben seems to be that, though this is a period of confusion, what Yeats
calls elsewhere a heterogeneous period, the artist at least must not surrender
to it, must still essay measurement and order.109 But in Under the
Mountain, MacNeice suggests that up close the world is always hetero-
geneous and it is among this heterogeneity that poets belong.
This dialogue between MacNeices poetry and aspects of Yeatss work is
continued in No More Sea. Another parable, this time on the dangers of
interpreting the past, the poem opens with a description of an island
(Dove-melting mountains, rivers gashed with water) that echoes Mac-
Neices preceding parodic poems on the west. But these rivers and
mountains give only a testimony of silence to the inhabitants of this
island, whose hearts themselves are islands, an image emphasizing that
each islander is also a distinct individual whose thoughts and emotions can
108 109
Variorum Yeats, 63640. MacNeice, Poetry of W.B. Yeats, 175.

never be fully comprehensible by other individuals, recapping sentiments
explored in I Crossed the Minch. The speaker imagines a situation in which
this island will become a part of the mainland and the islanders living
thoughts [ . . . ] coagulate in matter. Those mainlanders who follow will
feel no envy towards the islanders, unless some atavistic scholar discover-
ing a dusty relic will:
thence conceive a vague inaccurate notion
Of what it meant to live embroiled with ocean
And between the moving dunes and beyond reproving
Sentry-boxes to have been self-moving.
Although the terms of reference are general (islander, mainlander, and
scholar), as is typical of MacNeices post-war parables, this conguration
of an island with a western Irish-seeming landscape and an atavistic
scholar conceiving of some vague inaccurate notion of the lives of
islanders in the past, resonates strongly with the procedures of much of
Irish literature from the Revival onwards. As Gregory Castle elaborates in
Modernism and the Celtic Revival, the desire of many Irish writers to revive
Irelands indigenous culture
is the effect of an ethnographic imagination that emerges in the interplay of
native cultural aspirations and an array of practices associated with the
disciplines of anthropology, ethnography, archaeology, folklore, comparative
mythology, and travel writing.110
Castle investigates how this ethnographic imagination was artistically
productive and culturally empowering during the Revival.111 From the
vantage point of the mid-1940s, MacNeice is, contrastingly, emphasizing
the falsifying role of the atavistic scholar. The parable serves as a philo-
sophical gloss on MacNeices productive unease as a poet in Ireland, not
only as a poet in a specic place, but also as a poet among Irish poetrys
past and present.
110
Gregory Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 1.
111
Ibid., 11.
3
Letters Home
John Hewitt was not alone in arguing for the importance of a connection
between the writer and his or her geographical and cultural roots. In the
critical discussion that accompanied what Robert Greacen described as a
nascence among Northern Irish writers during the 1940s and early
1950s, the importance of maintaining a physical or spiritual connection
to the landscape and people of Ulster is a persistent theme.1 John Boyds
introduction to the rst issue of Lagan states that no writer, however
talented, should uproot himself in spirit from his native place.2 In a 1946
article published in Queens Universitys magazine The Northman
another key regionalist outletRoy McFadden argues that modern up-
rootedness must be counteracted by the vision of a community of artists
[ . . . ] here, in Northern Ireland, where industrialism has not entirely
blighted us, we have a chance of approaching that ideal. We are still
near the soil.3 J.N. Brownes essay Poetry in Ulster, part of an overview
of the arts compiled for the Festival of Britain, comments that in a
community so essentially rural, so marked by idiosyncrasy, such as we
nd in Northern Ireland, loss of contact with his background weakens the
poets individuality. The life of great cities has its intellectual stimulus, but
the emotional life cannot ourish there.4 Moreover, Hewitt kept on
reiterating his message in essays such as Regionalism: The Last Chance
(1947) and Poetry and Ulster: A Survey (1950), and the broadcasts Place
and Folk and Ulster Commentary (both 1949).5 As late as 1954 Hewitt
1
Robert Greacen, The Editor Says, in Robert Greacen, ed., Northern Harvest: Anthol-
ogy of Ulster Writing, (Belfast: Derrick MacCord, 1944), vvi.
2
John Boyd, Introduction, Lagan 1 (1943), 57: 5.
3
Roy McFadden, A Note on Contemporary Ulster Writing, The Northman 14.2
(Winter 1946), 205: 25.
4
J.N. Browne, Poetry in Ulster, in Sam Hanna Bell, Nesca A. Robb, and John Hewitt,
eds, The Arts in Ulster: A Symposium (London: Harrap, 1951), 13150: 148.
5
John Hewitt, Regionalism: The Last Chance, The Northman 15.3 (Summer 1947),
repr. in Ancestral Voices: The Selected Prose of John Hewitt, ed. Tom Clyde (Belfast: Black-
staff Press, 1987), 1225; John Hewitt, Poetry and Ulster: A Survey, Poetry Ireland 8
(January 1950), 310; John Hewitt, Place and Folk, broadcast on the Northern Ireland
Home Service, 19 April 1949, University of Ulster, John Hewitt Collection, Box 12; John

and McFadden discussed their by-then-divergent views on Regionalism
in Poetry on the Northern Ireland Home Service.6
Regionalism arose in Northern Ireland due to a complex set of circum-
stances associated with the legacies of Irish cultural nationalism and the
arrival of the Second World War, but it was, to quote Hewitt, in the air
beyond Northern Irelands boundaries too.7 Hewitts Place and Folk
broadcast drew parallels with the social criticism of Bertrand Russells
inaugural BBC Reith Lectures in 1948, published as Authority and the
Individual (1949), and T.S. Eliots Notes Toward the Denition of Culture
(1948), in which Eliot argued that man should feel himself to be, not
merely a citizen of a particular nation, but a citizen of a particular part of
his country, with local loyalties.8 Hewitts later memoir A North Light
(posthumously published in 2013, written c. 19611964) nds the origins
for his ideas in the work of the social theorists Lewis Mumford and Patrick
Geddes, but also discusses the concurrent appearance of regionalist ideas
in England, mentioning R.E. Dickinsons City Region and Regionalism:
A Geographical Contribution to Human Ecology (1947), Peter Self s Fabian
pamphlet Regionalism (1949), and Denys Val Bakers Britain Discovers
Herself (1950).9 Val Bakers polemical survey casts regionalism as part of a
silent revolution of the British people against the threats of centralization
and standardization. It prescribes, in familiar terms, that each writer
[ . . . ] must have a narrowly conned background, a native familiar sur-
round, from which, directly or indirectly, he can draw the inspiration for
his work.10
Hewitt, Ulster Commentary, broadcast on the Northern Ireland Home Service, 7 November
1949, University of Ulster, John Hewitt Collection, Box 12.
6
An unscripted discussion took place on Ariel: A Literary Programme, introduced by
Oliver Edwards and produced by John Boyd, broadcast on the Northern Ireland Home
Service, 11 November 1954, Roy McFadden Papers, Queens University Belfast, M30.
7
John Hewitt, The Bitter Gourd: Some Problems of the Ulster Writer, Lagan 3
(1945), repr. in Ancestral Voices: The Selected Prose of John Hewitt, ed. Tom Clyde (Belfast:
Blackstaff, 1987), 10821: 108. On the rise of regionalism more generally, see: Tom Clyde,
A Stirring of the Dry Bones: John Hewitts Regionalism, in Gerald Dawe and John Wilson
Foster, eds, The Poets Place: Ulster Literature and Society: Essays in Honour of John Hewitt,
19071987 (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1991), 24958; Richard Kirkland, The
Poetics of Partition: Poetry and Northern Ireland in the 1940s, in Fran Brearton and Alan
Gillis, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012), 21024.
8
Hewitt, Place and Folk; T.S. Eliot, Unity and Diversity: The Region, in Notes
Toward the Denition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), 5066: 52.
9
John Hewitt, A North Light: Twenty-Five Years in a Municipal Art Gallery, ed.
Frank Ferguson and Kathryn White (c. 19611964; Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013),
1446.
10
Denys Val Baker, Britain Discovers Herself (London: Christopher Johnson, 1950),
78.
Letters Home 81
Surveying the regionalism already prevalent in Northern Ireland, Scot-
land, and Wales, Baker looks favourably on the power of our Celtic
writers in contrast to English homogeneity. Hewitt similarly emphasizes
in The Bitter Gourd that: Wales has its quarterlies, its poets and, best of
all, its short story writers. Scotland has moved into what might be called its
second phase.11 Scottish literature had been undergoing a revival from the
1920s on, of course, as attested to by the considerable pre-war achieve-
ments of Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and Edwin and
Willa Muir, among others. The 1940s maintained what Robert Crawford
describes as a feeling of ongoing Scottish Renaissance through periodicals
such as Poetry Scotland (19431949) and Maurice Lindsays anthology Mod-
ern Scottish Poetry: An Anthology of the Scottish Renaissance 19201945
(1946)including work by the younger poets Robert Garioch, W.S.
Graham, Norman MacCaig, Sorley MacLean, and Sydney Goodsir
Smith.12 Anglo-Welsh literature had also started to emerge in the 1930s,
as evidenced by journals such as The Welsh Review (19391940) and Wales
(19371939); the latters rst issue contained work by Idris Davies, Kei-
drich Rhys, Lynette Roberts, Vernon Watkins, and Dylan Thomas.13
In England the war and the decline of empire had seen the growth of a
sense of identity rooted in landscape. This phenomenon is encapsulated
by Angus Calder in the phrase Deep England, which he uses in his
account of the mythology of the Blitz to describe an idealized England
stretching from Hardys Wessex to Tennysons Lincolnshire, from Ki-
plings Sussex to Elgars Worcestershire.14 In terms that parallel the
emphasis on wartime isolation in accounts of Ulsters literary nascence,
Robert Hewison argues that Britains isolation in the early years of the war
reinforced a picturesque idea of the landscape that was already in play on
both the left and right of the political divide in the 1930s. Reinforced by
wartime propaganda, this imagined pastoral landscape served as a contrast
to and compensation for all the destruction and stress of war.15 Hewison
highlights the connection between Deep England and the neo-Romantic
attachment of certain painters to particular locales, such as Paul Nash to
Oxfordshire or John Piper to Derbyshire. To this might be added the
11
Ibid., 20; Hewitt, The Bitter Gourd, 108.
12
Robert Crawford, Scotlands Books: The Penguin History of Scottish Literature (Pen-
guin: London, 2007), 606.
13
Roland Mathias, Anglo-Welsh Literature: An Illustrated Anthology (Bridgend: Poetry
Wales Press, 1986), 85.
14
Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), 182. I am
indebted to Elizabeth Robertson for drawing my attention to Calders notion and its
connection to the representation of Irish culture on the BBC Third Programme.
15
Robert Hewison, Culture and Consensus: England, Art and Politics since 1940 (rev.
edn, London: Metheun, 1997), 23.

cultural mapping of Britains regions pursued in the Shell County Guides
series published from 1934 on under the editorship of Piper and John
Betjeman.16 Another aspect of Deep England that shares characteristics
with Hewitts agenda is the fusing of the present with the located past,
both of history and of myth, as for example in Virginia Woolf s Between
the Acts (1941) and Eliots Little Gidding (1942), the last of his Four
Quartets, in which Eliot places the poem in a perfect site for England at
its deepest, drawing past and present together in a single visionary
moment.17 On a lower cultural plane, the Britain in Pictures series,
published by Collins between 1941 and 1949with titles including
Edmund Blundens English Villages (1941), Vita Sackville-Wests English
Country Houses (1944), and George Orwells The English People (1947)
also points to a mid-twentieth-century war-shadowed trend for produ-
cing works of somewhat nostalgic cultural self-denition that attempt to
characterize Englands landscape, history, and people, often in regional
terms.18
Beyond individuals efforts to promote regionalism, the process of
devolving culture happens in and through institutions, as Morag Shiach
observes.19 In post-war Northern Ireland this included the BBC. As
Hewitts radio broadcasts and the employment of Sam Hanna Bell and
John Boyd as producers imply, the corporation promoted the cultural
identity of Northern Ireland through its regional service.20 On becoming
Northern Ireland BBC controller in 1948, Andrew Stewart stressed the
importance of promoting work by writers from Ulster that dealt with
Ulster: the Northern Ireland Home Services main responsibility is to the
social, economic, and political affairs of the people of Ulster: farming and
country life are important, meaning an emphasis on writings with which
Ulster has afnities and the search for and imaginative treatment of
Ulster matter.21 The BBC was doing likewise across the United King-
dom. Having been halted during the war, regional broadcasting was
restored in July 1945 to the English regions and extended for the rst
16
See David Heathcote, A Shell Eye on England: The Shell County Guides 19341984
(Faringdon: Libri, 2011).
17
Hewison, Culture and Consensus, 24.
18
See Michael Carney, Britain in Pictures: A History and Bibliography (London: Werner
Shaw, 1995).
19
Morag Shiach, Nation, Region, Place: Devolving Cultures, in Laura Marcus and
Peter Nicholls, eds, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 52844: 530.
20
See Heather Clark, Regional Roots: The BBC and Poetry in Northern Ireland,
19451955, ireIreland 38.12 (SpringSummer 2003), 87103.
21
Rex Cathcart, The Most Contrary Region: The BBC in Northern Ireland 19241984
(Belfast: Blackstaff, 1984), 2679.
Letters Home 83
time to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.22 The director general
William Haley explained in the Radio Times that regionalization would
help to foster those national and local cultures which are an enduring part
of our heritage and which broadcasting can encourage more powerfully
than any other medium.23 L.A.G. Strong expressed similar sentiments in
the BBC Year Book, viewing individual views and ways of life expressed in
individual voices as a necessary corrective to civilizations move towards
mass production and uniformity.24 This meant not only the creation of
regional output for local listeners, but also the presentation of a region to
other parts of the country, meaning that there was a greater volume of
regional programming across the BBC as a whole.
A.T. Tolleys critical survey The Poetry of the Forties (1985), in a chapter
entitled Regional and Traditional, argues that the 1940s saw an upsurge
of regional awareness and of regional writing across Britain and Ireland.25
Tolley anoints Patrick Kavanaghs The Great Hunger (1942) as the dec-
ades outstanding regional poem, a judgement that links regionalism to
literary Dublin. Beyond the desire of writers from the North to promote a
distinctive local literature at the time, the critical discourses surrounding
Irish literature south of the border were similarly preoccupied with geo-
graphical and cultural roots. In 1952 Kavanagh attempted to separate his
localism from the geographical connections displayed by revivalist writers
as part of what John Goodby has described as a series of tactical shifts
made by the poet to avoid entrapment within stereotypes of Irishness.26
Kavanagh famously distinguished between the writer who has a parochial
mentality and is never in any doubt about the social and artistic validity
of his parish, and the provincial who has no mind of his own and does
not trust what his eyes see until he has heard what the metropolis [ . . . ] has
to say on any subject.27 Though clearly at some distance from the political
undertones of Hewitts agenda for Northern Ireland, Kavanagh is here
offering a retrospective defence of his pursuit of sociological modes in
relation to the local during the preceding decade, albeit at the level of the
22
Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, IV: Sound and Vision
(rev. edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 86.
23
William Haley, Radio Times (29 July 1945), qtd in Briggs, Sound and Vision, 87.
24
L.A.G. Strong, Long Live Regional Broadcasting, BBC Year Book 1945, qtd in Briggs,
Sound and Vision, 87.
25
A.T. Tolley, The Poetry of the Forties (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1985), 149, 166.
26
John Goodby, Irish Poetry since 1950: From Stillness into History (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2000), 35.
27
Patrick Kavanagh, Mao-Tse-Tung Unrolls His Mat, Kavanaghs Weekly (24 May
1952), repr. as Parochialism and Provincialism in Patrick Kavanagh, A Poets Country:
Selected Prose, ed. Antoinette Quinn (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2003), 237.

parish rather than the region. Critical of writers who go false and play up
to the larger parish on the other side of the Irish sea, he sees the parochial
mentality as a guard against the dangers of performing for a metropolitan
audience.28 Hence his critical savaging of F.R. Higgins in The Gallivant-
ing Poet (1947) for basing his work on the myth and illusion of the
larger entity that was Ireland, and so being plagued by insincerity.29
As Antoinette Quinn notes, Gallivanting was an early synonym for
bucklepping, a term Kavanagh applied to writers whom he accused of
peddling abroad bogus folksy Irishness.30 These included the by-now-
London-based W.R. Rodgers, whom Kavanagh described in 1952 in his
short-lived newspaper Kavanaghs Weekly as a remarkable bucklepper: he
is out of touch with anything that may be called Irish and he is not good
enough to live without a country.31
Those subject to Kavanaghs criticism for failing to be sincere were still
attempting to display their connection to Ireland as a place and as an idea.
As previously discussed, Higgins, Austin Clarke, and Robert Farren (sat-
irized in Kavanaghs The Paddiad as Paddy of the Celtic Mist and
Chestertonian Paddy Frog in competition for the title of greatest singer
of the bog)32 displayed an attachment to Irish culture through writing
poetry in English that reected the Irish-language poetic tradition. An
aspect of this was in the use of Irish-language poetrys supposed objective
tone, its concrete and vivid manner, which Higgins, in a note to his
collection The Dark Breed (1927), asserts is a reection of racial character:
The racial strength of a Gaelic aristocratic mindwith its vigorous
colouring and hard emotionis easily recognized in Irish poetry.33
Another aspect was the use of Irish-language poetrys formal characteris-
tics, as Clarke explains in a note to Pilgrimage and Other Poems (1929):
Assonance, more elaborate in Gaelic than in Spanish poetry, takes the
clapper from the bell of rhyme.34
In 1949 Sen OFaolin questioned this transfer of Gaelic poetrys
procedures into English verse, arguing that: Higgins and Clarke seem to
me to have exhausted the usefulness of the old assonantal modes. Indeed,
28
Ibid.
29
Patrick Kavanagh, The Gallivanting Poet, Irish Writing (December 1947), repr. in
Kavanagh, A Poets Country, 193201: 193.
30
Antoinette Quinn, Introduction, in Kavanagh, A Poets Country, 922: 14.
31
Patrick Kavanagh, Paris in Aran, Kavanaghs Weekly (7 June 1952), repr. in Kavanagh,
A Poets Country, 18992: 189.
32
Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems, ed. Antoinette Quinn (London: Allen Lane,
2004), 1507.
33
F.R. Higgins, The Dark Breed (London: Macmillan, 1927), 66.
34
Austin Clarke, Pilgrimage and Other Poems (London: Allen and Unwin, 1929), 43.
Letters Home 85
I feel that Clarke has taken the technique to the fair.35 Kavanagh was
more splenetic about the inuence of the dreary, uninspired bore Wil-
liam Larminie (an early promoter of the Irish mode in the 1890s), father
of Clarke and Co.36 Contrastingly, Farren vigorously praised Higgins and
Clarkes achievements in his 1948 study The Course of Irish Verse in
English (Kavanaghs review of which was so abusive The Irish Times
refused to print it), seeing their work as a sign of the growth in Irishness
of poetry composed in Ireland and by Irishmen.37 In terms that echo
Hewitts rhetoric (as well as Fianna Fils isolationist economic policies),
albeit in a more strained and bathetic register, Farren describes Higginss
work as evidence that Irish poets will benet by growing their own
potatoes in their own backgardens:
The making of a national poetry (to go from the top of the earth to its bowels
for a change of image) may well be a labour in the mines; but the Jones who
goes down with his pick for coal is the Jones who comes up with his paw for
pay; while your cosmopolitan writing is more like Nirvana: you pay for its
absence of pain by its absence of you. It has always seemed to Western man
to be better to be silly than extinct; just so you had better be a national assa
frivolous Frenchman, well say, or a muzzy German, a block-headed Eng-
lishman or even a priestridden Irishmanthan merely to rejoice as a grey
indiscriminate bubble in the thickest, hottest, most mouth-watering cosmo-
politan stew [ . . . ] Scouters and doubters will have it that, in this small
island, we are much too meagre in minds, in money, in men to hoist a bulk
of writing stamped as our own. To this contention Higgins is a hostile
witness; if they read him with attention he will give them the lie; of what
made his verse, or the differentia of his verse, barely a tithe came from
anywhere but Ireland.38
Farren also views aspects of Hewitts regionalist agenda as coinciding with
his own emphasis on the importance of a distinctly Irish mode:
Partition has by now become spiritual in some of those who live in the Six
Counties; and a poet like John Hewitt is strongly aware of his position. But
all that we mean by Ireland is holding them from absorption into English
poetry; and if the grip can be seen in Hewitt it has all but succeeded entirely
with Rodgers. A markedly Irish temperament and a love of the Irish country
keep him within the covey.39
35
Sen OFaolin, On Translating from the Irish, Poetry Ireland 4 (January 1949),
1417: 15.
36
Patrick Kavanagh, Diary, Envoy 2.7 (June 1950), 8391: 85.
37
Robert Farren, The Course of Irish Verse in English (London: Sheed and Ward, 1948),
xi; see note to The Paddiad in Kavanagh, Collected Poems, 276.
38
Farren, The Course of Irish Verse in English, 1312.
39
Ibid., 168.

Hewitt and Rodgers are co-opted into Farrens idea of a home-grown Irish
poetic tradition. Whether Ulster regionalist or Irish nationalist in persua-
sion, Irish critical writing throughout the 1940s and 1950s circled around
the importance of cultural and geographical roots.
Even The Bell, with its modernizing and outward-looking stance, was
party to this preoccupation.40 Sen OFaolins opening editorial in 1940
offered the real Ireland in place of Ireland as myth, including the plural-
istic assertion that the magazine belonged to Gentile or Jew, Protestant or
Catholic, priest or layman, Big House or Small House.41 Though origin-
ally subtitled A Magazine of Creative Fiction, The Bell primarily pursued its
editorial agenda through discussion pieces on current affairs and a wide
range of documentary articles. These ranged from rst-person accounts of
non-metropolitan working life to harder-hitting pieces such as a long-
running series documenting the daily life of a prisoner.42 But in the
context of the inward-looking restrictions imposed during the magazines
early years by Irish neutrality, in replacing the mythic with the real what
was often represented was actually the local. The attempt to uncover the
hidden Ireland was, in part, offering up an alternative set of roots. The
creation of a modern Irish identity in the magazine in practice became
associated with a longing for the recent past and a retreat into an idealized
rural landscape. As Clair Wills notes, the documentary realist movement
in Irish writing became associated with a form of provincial nostalgia.43
As with Deep England, an Ireland in which one could feel at home was
discovered.44
MacNeices critical reception in Ireland during the period reects these
preoccupations with identity and attachment. Though acknowledging
MacNeices Irish origins, Farren describes his work as almost wholly
English. Playing again on metaphors of soil and roots, he asserts that in
MacNeice the tradition of voluntary transplantation has its latest notable
example.45 Similarly Austin Clarke, in a review of Holes in the Sky,
40
For an overview of The Bell see: Frank Shovlin, The Irish Literary Periodical:
19231958 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 96130; Kelly Matthews, The Bell Magazine
and the Representation of Irish Identity (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012).
41
Sen OFaolin, This is Your Magazine, The Bell 1.1 (October 1940), 9.
42
For example: [Anon.], The Life of a Country Doctor, The Bell 3.1 (October 1941),
1927. The series I Did Penal Servitude ran from October 1944 to January 1945.
43
Clair Wills, That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland during the Second World
War (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 298, 294.
44
Conor Cruise OBrien parodied such sentiments in The Bells own pages through a
fake list of future features, including The Economics of Dog Racing and a symposium on
Crubeens v. Boxty. Donat ODonell [Conor Cruise OBrien], A Rider to the Verdict,
The Bell 10.2 (May 1945), 165.
45
Farren, The Course of Irish Verse, 166.
Letters Home 87
describes MacNeice as a shadowy and rather wistful wraith, almost a
Displaced Person, disparagingly comparing MacNeices haunting of the
rainy west in Western Landscape to the younger Ulster poets develop-
ment of a regional movement.46 As represented by Clarke, MacNeice is a
spectre rendered insubstantial by his inability to identify fully with Ire-
land; in the context of 1948, the labelling of MacNeice as almost a
Displaced Person equates him with a post-war refugee. Such is the fate,
Clarke somewhat luridly implies, of the Irish poet who turns his back on
his roots.
MacNeices work was similarly criticized in Northern Ireland. Roy
McFadden, discussing the problem of creating a literary tradition in the
north in The Bell in 1943, argues that MacNeice was never Irish, and it is
mere sentiment to imagine so. If he had continued to live in Belfast we
might well have some foundation for a new architecture in Irish poetry. As
it is, he is merely one of an ever-growing catalogue of names irretrievably
lost to this country.47 In a later review of MacNeices Collected Poems
19251948 (1949), McFadden employs the regionalist rhetoric that has
developed in the meantime. Drawing also on a spectral metaphor, he
argues that:
The only uneasy ghost in Mr. MacNeices mind is his place of origin. From
time to time the poet reverts to Ireland, nostalgically, impatiently,
contemptuouslyonly to set his face rmly again towards the English
scene. This retreat from childhood and country is a pity, for, in the absence
of any spiritual roots, Mr. MacNeice might well have strengthened his work
by allegiance to place. The man who has no country has no God, Dostoevsky
wrote some little time ago; and the intellectual poetry of to-day would seem
to bear him out, not only in that statement but in its corollary. Allegiance to
something beyond ones immediate time is a valuable asset in poetry. Mr.
MacNeice may yet apply for membership of Mr. Hewitts school of region-
alism, and, studying the superstitions and sugars of the forefathers, discover
Louis MacNeice. Come back, Paddy Reilly.48
McFaddens critique points to nationalisms or regionalisms status as a
substitute for religion: the absence of an attachment to the spiritual is
somehow to be overcome by an allegiance to place. More measured is
Hewitts placement in 1950 of MacNeice as by education and residence
46
Austin Clarke, Auden and Others (incl. review of Louis MacNeice, Holes in the Sky),
The Irish Times (9 October 1948), 6.
47
Roy McFadden and Geoffrey Taylor, Poetry in Ireland: A Discussion, The Bell 6.4
(July 1943), 4336.
48
Roy McFadden, review of Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems 19251948, Rann 7
(Winter 19491950), 1012: 11.

[ . . . ] rmly part of the English literary movement. Hewitts praise,
where he is, he is among the best, is tempered:
Whether his outstanding gifts will enable him to synthesise the conicts and
stresses of our day in terms of the permanent values of art may be a little
more in doubt. As it is he makes articulate and expresses not so much Man as
Metropolitan Man.49
As with McFadden, Hewitt criticizes MacNeices lack of allegiance to
something beyond his own experience, to something more permanent.
Even Robert Greacens enthusiastic 1950 exploration of The Ulster
Quality in Louis MacNeice displays similar modes of thought. MacNeice
is not an uprooted man, except in so far as we are all uprooted in a world
of debased values, but Greacen still stresses what roots he may have. He is
described as not quite English and lurking behind his sophistication, his
literae humaniores, there exists a directness that may be best described as
peasant. Greacen hypothesizes that it may have been that relative
nearness to the peasant mind which prevented him taking a denite
Left-wing stand in such movements as the struggle towards a Popular
Front in the near-Red Decade of the Thirties.50 MacNeices experience of
revolutionary change in Ireland, with its attendant violent complications,
might seem more relevant to his political scepticism than his nearness to
the peasant mind. Indeed, growing up in the well-to-do rectory in
Carrickfergus, looking down the lough to Belfast and its shipyards
looming cranes, one might wonder how many peasants MacNeice
encountered. But if Greacen is going to nd a way for MacNeice to be
admitted to the Ulster regionalist canon, the discovery of some attachment
to the soil seems to be necessary.
* * *
As explored in Chapter 2, MacNeices sequence of Achill poems in Holes
in the Sky responds to this persistent rhetoric of cultural and geographical
attachment across the Irish and British archipelago. These poems explore
the limits of the idea of a relationship with a particular place, such as
MacNeices childhood home on Belfast Lough or the western Irish
domain of his ancestors, implicitly testing the poetic prescriptions of
Hewitt, Higgins, and others. That his poetic persona is rendered ghostly
(a displaced wistful wraith) is not only due to his uprootedness. Rather
49
John Hewitt, Poetry and Ulster: A Survey, Poetry Ireland 8 (January 1950), 310: 7.
50
Robert Greacen, The Ulster Quality in Louis MacNeice, Poetry Ireland 8 (January
1950), 1518: 15. A positive contemporaneous Irish response is Valentine Iremonger,
review of Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems 19251948, Envoy 1.1 (December 1949),
7884.
Letters Home 89
MacNeice seems to imply that the process of trying to nd roots turns
him into a spectre, exposing the unbridgeable otherness of these land-
scapes, and even of his own memories, to his present self. Kirkland
describes Hewitts regionalism as a mode of evasion: a way of posing
delusory ethical debates on the question of bourgeois identity in his work
while avoiding any attempt to address political or territorial schism.51
Such political critique is not to be discounted on MacNeices part. As
suggested by the discussions of I Crossed the Minch (1938), Western
Landscape, and No More Sea in preceding chapters, for MacNeice
identication with a place involves more than merely visiting and writing
of it: problems of community, language, and labour impinge on any
dream of integrated existence. Yet his poetry persistently suggests that
the evasions and delusions underpinning regionalism, no less than cultural
nationalism, are also metaphysical; alienation is not merely a question of
political or territorial schism either. However, in Holes in the Sky, and
moving on into the new poems included in Collected Poems 19251948
and the collections Ten Burnt Offerings (1952) and Autumn Sequel (1954),
MacNeice also offers other kinds of response to this preoccupation with
roots in Irish and British culture during the period.
Placed six poems on from Western Landscape in Holes in the Sky,
Woods returns to the western territory of several of the Achill poems and,
like The Strand, features MacNeices father.52 As McDonald notes, it
comes from the opposite direction, using England to test the limits of
characteristically Irish ways of perception.53 Sent across to school in
Dorset, the poems speaker found a planting [ . . . ] alluring, whereas his
father who found the English landscape tame | Had hardly in his life
walked in a wood. The poet has not only his fathers bog or rock, but
also this other, this English, choice (the wood) of escape from his normal
environment. The displacement that is portrayed as a aw by Ulster
regionalist or Irish literary nationalist critics is here an advantage. Mac-
Neice has other options, not only of landscape but also, in literary terms,
of the fantasy worlds of Malorys knights, | Keatss nymphs or the
Midsummer Nights Dream. This other choice also opens alternate
modes of thought: a terrain of moral complications, half-truths and
not-quites, in contrast to his fathers capitalized absolutes, True and
Good. His imaginative and intellectual resources are strengthened rather
51
Richard Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965
(London: Longman, 1996), 30; Kirklands emphasis.
52
MacNeice, Collected Poems, ed. Peter McDonald (London: Faber and Faber, 2007),
2712.
53
1991), 219.

than weakened; to be alienated, MacNeice implies, is not to be poetically
disempowered.
MacNeice during the late 1940s and early 1950s also started to write at
length about locations other than England or Ireland, most notably India
and Greece. In some respects this was nothing new. MacNeice had written
travel poems about Iceland, the Hebrides, and Spain in the 1930s, and the
period of time that he spent in the United States at the beginning of the
war had resulted in American-set poems.54 It was also a response to
professional circumstances: in August 1947, MacNeice was sent to the
Indian subcontinent for three months by the BBC to cover the end of
British rule and the establishment of the dominions of Pakistan and India;
he and his family moved to Athens for eighteen months in 19501951,
while he took up the directorship of the British Institute there.55 The
manner in which MacNeice writes of India and Greece at this point is
somewhat different from his earlier travel writing or from the travel poetry
he would go on to write in the late 1950s. These poems resemble many of
MacNeices longer poems of the period, such as The Kingdom, The
Stygian Banks, and The Window, in that they struggle to embody what
they overtly discuss.56 They are caught between an attempt to dene the
places of which he is writing and anxiety over the possibility and desir-
ability of such denition. MacNeice also engages in several shows of
imaginative licence and power through the length, range of cultural
reference, and philosophical ambition of much of his poetry during
these years. A parallel case is W.H. Audens poetry of the 1940s and
1950s; also relevant is the high cultural tone encouraged by the launch of
the BBC Third Programme in 1946, an outlet for much of MacNeices
work during the period, not least his long poems.57 Such displays of
authority act as bulwarks against the chastening metaphysical implications
and political disaffections of much of this poetry. While rejecting certain
kinds of attachment, whether Irish nationalist or Ulster regionalist, Mac-
Neice offers attachment to a wider, international, sense of culture or to
personal relationships. In contrast to rooted man is set, to quote Hewitts
criticism, Metropolitan Man, whom in displaying his learned, urbane, and
cosmopolitan credentials is also pursuing, to return to Kirklands analysis of
regionalism, a mode of evasion, protecting himself against his own chal-
lenge to the very notion of rootedness as some kind of solution to a
54
MacNeice, Collected Poems, 1989, 2012.
55
Jon Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 355, 376.
56
MacNeice, Collected Poems, 2419, 28295, 30712.
57
Briggs, Sound and Vision, 60; Kate Whitehead, The Third Programme: A Literary
History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Barbara Coulton, Louis MacNeice in the BBC
(London: Faber and Faber, 1980), 8397, 206.
Letters Home 91
post-war world with which he is deeply uneasy.58 On one level MacNeice is
making other choices. Indeed, Ireland is noticeably absent from Ten Burnt
Offerings and Autumn Sequel, books that to the suspicious glance of a
Hewitt, as Goodby notes, might have seemed to be vitiated by their
authors inability to make the necessary, hard choices about where he
belonged.59 But in turning away from Ireland, his poems suggest analogies
and parallels in considering the relationship between poet and place, and
poet and community.
Sent back to London from India as a last-minute addition to Holes in
the Sky, Letter from India was the rst poem that MacNeice wrote in
response to the subcontinent.60 He described India as the most foreign
country he had visited: If we use the word foreign for Italy or Iceland,
we should really nd some other word for India.61 With India too much to
take in, a sinister miasma of impressions, the poem can only restage
Conrads Heart of Darkness (1899) and, Kurtz-like, register that this
India, torn by the sectarian violence of partition, jolts the European into
seeing the horror: The lid is off, the things that creep | Down there are we,
we were there always. The verse letter is addressed to his wife, Hedli, and in
the face of Indias bewildering multiplicity and erupting violence MacNeice
starts to feel uncertain of his ability to see even her:
For though to me an absolute person
Yet even you and even by me
Being clamped by distance in a burqa
Cannot be seen, still less can see
How in this earlier century
Dark children daub the skies with arson.
This crisis is somewhat glibly controlled at the poems end through a long
Donnesque conceit that nds a point of connection for east and west in
his and Hedlis future love:
An India sleeps below our West,
So you for me are proud and nite
As Europe is, yet on your breast
I could nd too that undistressed
East which is east and west and neither?
58
Hewitt, Poetry and Ulster: A Survey, 7; Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern
Ireland, 30.
59
Goodby, Irish Poetry Since 1950, 57.
60
Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice, 364; MacNeice, Collected Poems, 2958.
61
Louis MacNeice, India at First Sight, in BBC Features, ed. Laurence Gilliam
(London: BBC, 1950), repr. in Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1990), 16370: 163.

As Ashok Bery argues, In the context of the oundering and disorienta-
tion evident throughout the poem, these concluding stanzas seem to offer
a somewhat unconvincing resolution, willed into existence rather than
prepared for and achieved.62 The closing lines cannot mask that India
does not only alienate: MacNeices being there highlights the fragility of
his sense of identication with the person he knows most intimately.
MacNeice was also sending letters home in other ways. As Kit Fryatt
shows, he expressly points to parallels with Ireland in his responses to the
new dominions.63 India at First Sight, an account of his travels published
as part of a BBC Features anthology, explains that educated Indians are as
politics-ridden as the Irish (perhaps this is inevitable with subject or newly
liberated peoples). The same article also warns against viewing the authors
of sectarian violence as inhuman: in fact (and on a much smaller scale I have
found the same thing in Ireland) men can be not only intelligent but kindly,
not only charming but generous, in all respects but one, and in that can be
demons.64 The Road to Independence, one of three three-hour radio features
that MacNeice wrote on India and Pakistan, presents an exchange between
an Englishman and an Indian about nationalism, by way of Ireland and the
preface to George Bernard Shaws John Bulls Other Ireland (1904):
hindu: [ . . . ] You [British] people never understood anyone. Look how
you treated Ireland! I have read Bernard Shaw on the subject and
englishman: I have read Bernard Shaw on it too; I can quote him
to you from Nineteen-Four. Nationalism stands between Ireland and the
light of the world
hindu: But!
englishman: Nobody in Ireland of any intelligence likes
nationalism
hindu: But Shaw was a nationalist!
englishman: Wait: any more than a man with a broken arm likes
having it set. A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a
healthy man of its bones. But if you break a nations nationality it will
think of nothing else but getting it set again. And that I think is pretty
true of India.
hindu: Yes, it is true of India.65
62
Ashok Bery, Louis MacNeice, Ireland and India, in Cultural Translation and Post-
colonial Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 74100: 92.
63
Kit Fryatt, Banyan riot of dialectic: Louis MacNeices India, in Ireland and India:
Colonies, Culture and Empire, ed. Tadhg Foley and Maureen OConnor (Dublin: Irish
Academic Press, 2006), 14052: 1436.
64
MacNeice, India at First Sight, 1645.
65
Louis MacNeice, The Road to Independence, broadcast BBC Home Service, 23 May
1948, qtd in Fryatt, Louis MacNeices India, 1445.
Letters Home 93
Writing for a British audience, MacNeice offers his familiarity with
politics-ridden Ireland, and its nationalism and sectarian violence, as a
frame through which to understand the situation unfolding in India. This
is of course a means of complicating that audiences reaction to Indias
nationalism and political violence, in that the comparison with Ireland
draws attention to the wider legacy of British imperialism, now in decline.
MacNeices work on India also stylistically resembles aspects of his
writing on Ireland. As Fryatt notes, it also uses lists, strings of grammat-
ically undifferentiated clauses, paradox and she compares the furious
parataxis of the closing lines of Valediction to the overwhelming sense
impressions created by Mother Indias litanies in the feature India at First
Sight.66 MacNeice was acutely aware of the dangers of smoothing out the
chaos of partition and the British handover, as well as misrepresenting the
subcontinents historical and cultural complexities. Robyn Marsacks
examination of the drafts of Letter from India reveals that MacNeice
was anxious to discard any intolerance, any Western frame of reference
that might foil his attempt to communicate the alien quality of India.67 In
avoiding entrapping India within a concrete, singular identity, however,
an incoherent alternative is presented that is in danger of turning India
into an exotic other:
smiling, sidling, cuddling hookahs
They breed and broil, breed and brawl,
Their name being legend while their lifewish
Verging on deathwish founders all
This colour in one pool, one pall[.]68
Differences are levelled off. In some senses this failure of description is a
successful part of the poems disillusioned, defeated tone. But it also points
to the dangers of the means by which MacNeice sometimes wrote of
Ireland. His descriptive deluges, whether as invective, as in Valediction,
or as parody, as in Western Landscape, for all their irony, draw MacNeice
into a discourse of cultural denition and identication. They resurrect
the stereotypes he seeks to escape, rather like Shaws John Bulls Other
Ireland, in which, Declan Kiberd suggests, the Anglo-Irish antithesis is
questioned, only to be reasserted in a slightly modied form.69
66
Broadcast BBC Home Service, 13 March 1948; Fryatt, Louis MacNeices India, 146.
67
68
69
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London:
Vintage, 1996), 55.

Mahabalipuram is a search for a perspective beyond such cultural
baggage.70 A response to a seventh-century Shore Temple elaborately
carved out of rock in the coastal town of Mahabalipuram, south of what
is now Chennai but was then Madras, the poem considers the ways in
which a work of art may continue to have signicance. For those visitors,
including the speaker, to whom mantra and mudra mean little, this
might be found through an aesthetic experience rather than a sense of
cultural connection:
But now that we look without trying to learn and only look in the act of leaping
After the sculptor into the rockface, now we can see, if not hear, those phrases,
To be neither strange nor dead.
For once something is communicated, a presence felt and experience had.
Described in mystical terms, the carved gures incarnate the immaterial
world, as archetypes of the sleep lost | When we were born, and their
effect is ecstatic, taking tourists out of themselves [ . . . ] to nd themselves
in a world | That has neither rift nor rim. After this exalted moment
passes, the possibility of a world without edge and rupture, a unity beyond
the self to which to aspire, continues to offer solace:
we have seen
God take shape and dwell among shapes, we have felt
Our ageing limbs respond to those ageless limbs in the rock
Reliefs. Relief is the word.
Notable as well as this moment of relief is MacNeices need for such relief.
Though he has turned away from the extensions beyond the self demanded
by Irish critics (to landscape, cultural history, and national or regional
community), he is still searching for the consolatory possibility of connec-
tion with the other beyond rift and rim. In 1948 MacNeice approvingly
wrote that Auden in the 1930s had got some sort of a positive world-view, a
blend of the Marxist and Freudian, and that in Eliots poetry a positive
world-view, in his case, it happens, a Christian onehas for a long time
now pervaded his work, redeeming it in form from impressionism and in
content from nihilism. A similar development can be seen in Yeats.71
MacNeices advocacy of a positive world view was not particular to this
period. Back in the late 1930s in Modern Poetry he asserted that: The good
poet has a denite attitude to life; most good poets, I fancy, have more than
70
71
Louis MacNeice, English Poetry Today, Listener 40.1023 (2 September 1948),
3467: 347.
Letters Home 95
thatthey have beliefs.72 William T. McKinnon explores how much of
MacNeices own career was a journey through the difculty of nding this
system of belief.73 In MacNeices poetry at this point, though, his search for
a world-view intersects with an overt attempt to engage with particular
locations. His praise of the positive world views of Auden, Eliot, and Yeats,
when placed in relation to this engagement, sounds surprisingly like McFad-
dens future criticism of his Collected Poems, with its talk of MacNeices lack
of spiritual roots and assertion that Allegiance to something beyond ones
immediate time is a valuable asset in poetry.74 Both McFaddens prescrip-
tion of allegiance to place and MacNeices praise of a positive world-view
are attempts to get beyond impressionism and nihilism, and, through a
form of belief, carry the poet beyond the self.
Ten Burnt Offerings, mostly written during his time in Greece, is Mac-
Neices most sustained attempt to do this, overtly displaying and exploring
the idea of cultural knowledge and connection. Several of its long poems
make implicit comparisons between MacNeices persona and other dis-
placed individuals, such as Byron, St Thomas, and Odysseus. In doing so,
MacNeice is again making other choices as regards the diktats of his Irish
critics. He is also nding or rather creating something approximating to
Hewitts notion of ancestors of the emotions, of the quality and slant of
mind.75 In Didymus, the fourth burnt offering, MacNeice nds a
precursor in the doubting apostle Thomas.76 It is believed Thomas may
have travelled to Madras, forming a parallel with MacNeices own encoun-
ter with Indias banyan riot of dialectic. Thomass MacNeice-like doubt
and empiricism are a model of integrity (Liar? Not Thomas; he had too
much doubt), the reward for which was the conrmation of Gods human-
ity, as one who had thrust his ngers into the wounds of God. The poem
vindicates MacNeices own scepticism and testing of belief through experi-
ence as in itself a kind of world-view. It also implicitly defends the way in
which those poems written by MacNeice in Ireland at the beginning and
end of the Second World War, such as The Coming of War and the Achill
poems, examine the limits of his own attachment to Ireland.
In Cock o the North, the preceding poem in the collection, Mac-
Neice unpicks the fate of Bryon as a Scot, a Romantic hero, and a
philhellenic nation-builder, drawing on the earlier research for his 1943
72
1938), 62.
73
William T. McKinnon, Apollos Blended Dream: A Study of the Poetry of Louis
MacNeice (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 42.
74
McFadden, review of MacNeice, Collected Poems 19251948, 11.
75
Hewitt, The Bitter Gourd, 116. 76

radio feature The Death of Lord Byron. Cock o the North, as John
Kerrigan explains, was a nickname associated with Byrons Scottish
family, the Gordons, and the title of a pipe tune frequently played by
Scottish regiments.77 The poems Scottish concerns are underlined by the
epigraph that follows: But I am half a Scot by birth, and bred | A whole
one, and my heart ies to my head. The lines come from Canto X of Don
Juan (18191824), when Byron is making his peace, by way of acknow-
ledging his Scottishness, with Francis Jeffrey, the editor of the Edinburgh
Review, whom he had satirized in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
(1809):
when I use the phrase of Auld Lang Syne!
Tis not addressd to youthe mores the pity
For me, for I would rather take my wine
With you, than aught (save Scott) in your proud city.
But somehow,it may seem a schoolboys whine,
And yet I seek not to be grand nor witty,
But I am half a Scot by birth, and bred
A whole one, and my heart ies to my head,78
In a letter to Terence Tiller that accompanied six of these burnt offerings
back to the BBC, MacNeice hoped that this epigraph to Cock o the
North would sanction the bagpipe tunes in Section I & the dialect in
Section IV, which ventriloquizes Byron in braid Scots.79 The bagpipe
tunes in the rst section are implicitly suggested through the title and the
epigraphs allusion to Byrons evocation of the singing of Auld Lang
Syne. As Kerrigan also notes, they are enacted by the ballad-like vigorous,
skirling start of the poem, in long-lined fours and threes, like MacNeices
earlier Bagpipe Music, a travesty of the hexameter calculated to mock
classical heroics: Bad Lord Byron went to the ring, helmet dogs and all, |
He rode and he swam and he swam and he rode but now he rode for a
fall.80 Although the rst section of Cock o the North focuses on Byrons
ill-fated attempt to ght for Greek independence in 18231824, Mav-
rocordato, Colocotroni, faction, ction and all, the Romantic nationalism
underpinning the expedition is set to a faux-Scottish tune. The way in
which MacNeice presents Byrons interest in Ancient Greece as the
77
John Kerrigan, Louis MacNeice among the Islands, in Peter Mackay, Edna Longley,
and Fran Brearton, eds, Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), 5886: 58.
78
The Complete Poetical Works of Lord Byron, V: Don Juan, ed. Jerome J. McGann
79
Louis MacNeice to Terence Tiller, 21 April [1951], in Letters of Louis MacNeice, ed.
80
Letters Home 97
motivation behind his political involvement in modern Greece, Twang
the lyre and rattle the lexicon, Marathon, Harrow and all, reverberates
back to the way in which Scottish national identity was constituted in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through an antiquarian
engagement with Scottish heroic history and folklore, such as in the
work of James MacPherson and Walter Scott. Indeed, Auld Lang Syne
forms part of this romanticized engagement with the Scottish past, having
supposedly been, as Robert Burns claimed, an old Song of the olden
times which had never been in print, nor even in manuscript until Burns
took it down from an old mans singing.81 MacNeices poem suggests
that Byrons Greek nationalism is informed by the sound and some of the
sense of Scottish Romantic revivalism.
The second section of Cock o the North is set in present-day Misso-
longhi, where Byron died. MacNeice there confronts the underwhelming
aftermath of the revolutionary fervour in which Byron, or Veeron as
pronounced by the Greeks, played his part:
You would never guess
This from his statue in the Garden of Heroes
Among the arranged trees and the marble clichs
And the small memorial cannon like staring infants
With lollipops in their mouths. You would never guess
From Greece who Veeron was. Across the gulf
Hier stand, hier sass Their Royal Highnesses . . .
The marble bust of Clauss, benevolent distiller,
Guards his titanic vats, German epigonos
Who found Greece free and under a foreign king,
Frockcoats instead of turbans.
The memorialized heroic gure of Byron gives way to the realpolitik of
Britain, France, and Russias placing of the Bavarian Otto on the Greek
throne, approached through musing on the statue of Gustav Clauss, a
Bavarian fortied-wine maker (rather than distiller) who, following in
Ottos wake, set up a winery in Patras in the 1860s. Writing to his friend
the Northern Irish sculptor George MacCann, MacNeice remarked:
There are some Victorian-Romantic (v. Bad) canvasses in Missolonghi
Town Hall featuring highly combustive battles with Ibrahim Pasa on a
white horse rampant doing the King Billy Act.82 Such a link between
81
Robert Burns to George Thomson, [early September 1793], The Letters of Robert
Burns, II: 17901796, ed. J. De Lancey Ferguson and G. Ross Roy (2nd edn, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1985), 246.
82
Louis MacNeice to George MacCann, 22 June [1950], qtd in Stallworthy, Louis
MacNeice, 382.

Greek Victorian-Romantic nationalism and Orange triumphalism sug-
gests that MacNeice (by way of Scotland) is again pursuing an oblique
comparative approach towards Irish culture. Byron is also another precur-
sor for MacNeicea poet who is uneasy with his Scottishness but
concedes in Don Juan that he cannot completely escape this aspect of
his identity, before then thinking of Scotland in distinctly sentimental
terms:
As Auld Lang Syne brings Scotland, one and all,
Scotch plaids, Scotch snoods, the blue hills, and clear streams,
The Dee, the Don, Balgounies Brigs black wall,
All my boy feelings, all my gentler dreams
Of what I then dreamt, clothed in their own pall,
Like Banquos offspring;oating past me seems
My Childhood in this childishness of mine:
I care nottis a glimpse of Auld Lang Syne.83
Such sentiments are echoed in the kinds of romanticizing impulses about
the landscape of the west of Ireland that MacNeice considers in Western
Landscape or his earlier admission in Autumn Journal that he likes being
Irish because: It gives us a hold on the sentimental English.84 A long view
is opened up in Cock o the North on MacNeices situation as an Irish
poet abroad, as the poem points to the dangers of nostalgia for home being
displaced into ones attitude to elsewhere, in Byrons case Greece. The
bleaker irony overhanging the poem is that Byron is an unfullled heroic
gure, dying before he can make it to battle and at a remove from the
gures from ancient Greek myth or history also mentioned: Meleager,
Leonidas, Militiades, and Adonis (although they also all met untimely
deaths). Furthermore, as the subsequent history of the country after
independence had made clear by the early 1950s, Greeces golden age
had not returned.85
In the fourth section of Cock o the North, MacNeice complicates
Don Juans display of Romantic nationalism. Byrons voice when put into
Scots nds an unsentimental register in which to face death directly,
stripped of heroic delusions: Mither! Mither! Blaw the bellows! | My
foreign doctors kill to heal | And the last licht leads to darkness. As
Kerrigan suggests, the incitement to give Byron Scots is likely to have
come from Hugh MacDiarmid, who had been promoting Byrons Scot-
tishness, as well as the revival of Scots verse, since the 1920s.86 MacDiar-
mids anthology A Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry (1940)containing
83 84
Byron, Don Juan, 4412. MacNeice, Collected Poems, 139.
85
Ibid., 327. 86
Letters Home 99
the ballad Edward that the refrain Mither! Mither! was taken from
was approvingly reviewed by MacNeice in terms that illuminate Cock o
the North:
if people expect from the Scots what they insist on expecting from the
Irisha lot of loose blather and mist, they have only to read this book to
be disappointed. The typical Scottish poet has an eye, a physical solidity, a
precision of phrase, an elegant music and a knack of hard hitting which are
admirable.
Against the romanticized Celtic ScottishIrish stereotype, he asserts Scot-
tish poetrys visual clarity and verbal precision. Similarly, the fourth
section of Cock o the North discovers an alternative Scots voice in
which the reality of death can be confronted, in contrast to the faux-
bagpipe music of the rst section, which leads Byron into the realm of
fantasy. Returning to the grounds of critique pursued in relation to
traditional culture in Bagpipe Music and I Crossed the Minch, as discussed
in Chapter 1, two ideas of Scottish poetry are played off against each other.
The rst, present in the quotation from Don Juan and continued in the
rst section, is achieved through a supercial self-identication with
landscape, clothes, or folk song. With the second, in the fourth section,
an unsentimental, unaffected attitude to life is arrived at through adopting
Scots, a better medium, MacNeices review agrees with MacDiarmid,
than English for Scottish poets.87
MacNeices review of A Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry makes further
Irish comparisons. It suggests that Yeatss Oxford Book of Modern Verse,
bad as it was, gave us, thanks to the inclusion of certain Irish poets and
translators, writing in a live ballad tradition, a momentary respite from our
dutiful self-consciousness and describes MacDiarmids anthology as also
offering such respite, deserving to stand beside Mr. Lennox Robinsons
Golden Treasury of Irish Verse and I mean this as high praise.88 The use of
Scots in Cock o the North might be linked, therefore, to MacNeices
assessment of Irish poetry. MacNeices study of Yeats, published like the
review of MacDiarmids anthology in 1941, argues that in trying to avoid
the materialism of the Saxon, Yeats for some time misrepresented the
genius of the Gael, following Matthew Arnolds supposed assertion of the
Celts reaction again the despotism of fact. As quoted in Chapter 2,
MacNeice cites Thomas MacDonaghs description of early Irish poetry
as clear, direct, gem-like, and hard, and Sen OFaolins estimate of
87
Louis MacNeice, Scottish Poetry (review of A Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry,
ed. Hugh MacDiarmid), The New Statesman and Nation 21.517 (18 January 1941), 66.
88
Ibid.

Irish nature poetry as free from the English sentimental attitude to
nature; far from being pantheistic it is elegantly matter-of-fact, as well as
noting the materialism, hardness, and cruel humour of Frank OConnors
translations of Irish poetry. MacNeice nds a vein of hardness lasting
into the English ballad poetry written in Ireland in the eighteenth
century, citing Johnny, I hardly knew ye, which represents Ireland more
truly than all the songs of Moore.89 MacNeice jumps back to before
Thomas Moore to unearth a supposedly more authentic pre-Romantic
alternative tradition, Irelands live ballad tradition, which has already
crossed the linguistic divide. Early Irish-language poetry and Irish eight-
eenth-century ballad poetry in English are both viewed as possessing
similar qualities to the typical Scottish poets physical solidity [ . . . ]
precision of phrase [ . . . ] elegant music and [ . . . ] knack of hard hitting.
To return to Cock o the North, MacNeices poetry again seems to be
indirectly examining his own relationship with Ireland and with prevalent
arguments in Irish critical culture. Via Scotland and Greece, the dangers
are asserted of trying to nd ones identity through a merely sentimental
connection to the colour of landscape, song, and history. Conversely, the
poems nal section arrives at a live tradition that is there to be appro-
priated, as here embodied in the Scots dialect ballad. MacNeice has a
seemingly real literary mode, based on linguistic difference, performa-
tively displace an affected Scottishness, in a move that echoes his earlier
identication of a pre-Romantic living Irish literary tradition, as opposed
to a post-Romantic faux-Celticism. Two senses of identity are played off
against one another: between identity as what the poet identies with
beyond the self, whether that be ancient Greek history or Scottish trad-
itional clothing, and identity as language, style, and form, which embody a
distinct world view.
Cock o the North as a whole, however, despite its arrival at the second
of these notions of identity, also problematically remains attached to the
rst. Irredeemably modern and post-Romantic, MacNeice cannot, except
in affectation, claim to write within a live ballad tradition or escape
dutiful self-consciousness for long. Like Byron, he is a cosmopolitan
travelling through Greece, able to draw on many points of cultural
comparison, such as to Byrons life and work or to the history of Greece,
ancient and modern. Through these points of reference, an attachment to
a wider sense of culture is offered as an answer to more narrow cultural
attachmentswhether of Byron and Jeffrey to Scotland, or by extension
those of Irish nationalists or Ulster regionalists. As already argued, Ten
89
Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (London: Oxford University Press, 1941),
479.
Letters Home 101

Burnt Offerings more generally attempts to empower MacNeice as a poet
through displays of cultural knowledge and connection. In doing so the
volume cannot escape the consensus within Irish and British culture
during the period of a need for a cultural identity of some kind. Even in
apparent opposition to such a notion, MacNeice at this point does not
escape prevailing critical pressures. His poems build alternative, less philo-
sophically or politically compromised, models of attachment, in oppos-
ition to a disorientating post-war world, rather than attaining the
uninching stance towards reality that he, somewhat idealistically,
imagines Byron nding through a braid Scots ballad.
* * *
Autumn Sequel follows a similar path in struggling to sketch out an
alternative kind of community. Clair Wills convincingly argues that the
poem is in some senses a national story, a kind of English and Welsh
regional pageant, displaying, as MacNeice explained to T.S. Eliot, afn-
ities to Spensers Faerie Queene (so drawing on the English literary
inheritance invoked in Woods).90 One of the ironies of MacNeices
entanglement with the problem of Irishness, to use Emilie Morins helpful
formulation, is that he came close at this point in his career to being an
English national poet.91 Yet for all the geographical, historical, and
cultural mapping that Autumn Sequel undertakes, centred around the
national institution of the BBC, the community envisaged in the poem
is an extension of the collective of individuals depicted earlier in The
Kingdom.92 MacNeice tempers any sense of a national community
through celebrating his relationships with friends. To gag the Parrot, a
recurring symbol of a mechanical civilization in the poem, the opening
canto calls forward the human voices of:
Gavin and Gwilym, and Aiden, Isabel, Calum, Aloys,
Devlin, Hilary, Jenny, Blundell, McQuitty, Maguire,
Stretton and Reilly and Price, Harrap and Owen and Boyce,
Egdon and Evans and Costa and Wimbush and Gorman [ . . . ]93
90
Clair Wills, A Parrots Lie: Autumn Sequel and the BBC, in Fran Brearton and
Edna Longley, eds, Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his Legacy (Manchester: Carca-
net Press, 2012), 190203: 2001; Louis MacNeice to T.S. Eliot, 30 March [1954], Letters
of Louis MacNeice, 573.
91
Emilie Morin, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009).
92
93
Louis MacNeice, note on Autumn Sequel, Canto XVIII, London Magazine 1.1
(February 1954), 104; MacNeice, Collected Poems, 374.

Among these pseudonyms stand Dylan Thomas (Gwilym), W.H. Auden
(Egdon), Ernie OMalley (Aiden), George MacCann (Maguire), F.R. Higgins
(Reilly), E.R. Dodds (Boyce), and W.R. Rodgers (Gorman).94 Their individ-
ual qualities are celebrated, but their common characteristic is their making
something in the face of the great No-God of time and death, as expressed in
the Fanfare for the Makers of Canto VII: Bit by bit, | Brick by brick and
tock by tick we build | Our victory over the clock.95 This is a contingent
community of MacNeices imagining based on becoming rather than being,
whose common identity comes from a shared attitude towards life, rather
than an allegiance to any particular place or race. In this canto at least, the
national story is recast as a story of friendship and mutual, though also
independent, endeavour against bigger supra-national foes: time, death.
However, even on its own terms, such a position still relies on nding a
community with which to identify.
Autumn Sequel also extends the group beyond MacNeices friends. As
the majority of the poem was broadcast in the summer of 1954, this poem
was written with a wider community in mind: the seven gure audience
who makes things hard | Because they want things easy listening to BBC
radio.96 As this quote suggests, the poem throughout displays an ambiva-
lent attitude towards its mass audience, yet also sometimes idealizes its
members, as the Fanfare for the Makers broadens out to include in its
praises such everyday gures as mothers who sit up late night after night |
Moulding a life and workers who can take pride | In spending sweat
before they draw their pay.97 MacNeice is uneasy about being cast as a
national or regional poet, even at the point at which he comes closest to
taking up such a position. This is encompassed in the poems use of the
symbol of the Parrot, drawing on John Skeltons late medieval satire on
the position of the court poet in Speke Parrot, and offering something of
an Anglocentric, radiophonic guration of the minstrelsy complex dis-
cussed in Chapter 1.98 Yet even when attempting to recongure this
uneasy role, he still presents himself as writing and, crucially, broadcasting
from within and for a community.
In striving to conjure his own community in Autumn Sequel, MacNeice
is not only struggling in the face of the allure of Deep England but also
showing similar impulses to his Irish critics.99 This points to a degree of
shared intellectual ground with some of his Irish contemporaries,
94
MacNeices friends in Autumn Sequel are identied in an appendix of Stall-
worthys biography: Louis MacNeice, 487.
95 96
97
Wills, Autumn Sequel and the BBC, 1934; MacNeice, Collected Poems, 406.
98
Wills, Autumn Sequel and the BBC, 1913.
99
Calder, The Myth of the Blitz, 182.
Letters Home 103

particularly with the ideas underpinning Hewitts regionalism. Terence
Brown has highlighted MacNeices deep concern for the survival of local
communities in work going back to the 1930s, such as I Crossed the
Minch.100 Brown links this to MacNeices growing unease at the com-
mercialization of British society and its growing uniformity after the
Second World War, viewing Ireland in MacNeices post-war poetry as
often an imaginative alternative to the increasingly homogenous culture
of a mass society.101 Certainly, MacNeice in several of his post-war poems
set in Ireland, such as the Achill sequence discussed in Chapter 2, explores
Irelands ability to offer such an alternativeeven if he then does not seem
to be at home in Ireland either. Autumn Sequel, a poem that does not
expressly look to Ireland, also articulates concern at the homogenization of
the modern world and seeks out imaginative alternatives.
In Canto III MacNeice travels out of London to a lm studio in
Buckinghamshire to look at the rushes for The Conquest of Everest, a
documentary on the preparations for the rst successful expedition to
climb Everest for which he was writing the script.102 Taking the suburban
train [ . . . ] past the antennae of Wembley | And Sudbury Hill, drab realms
of television, out to the leaer domain of semi-detached houses and golf
courses, the poet arrives at Everest: The icefall tumbling from the West-
ern Cwm | Above which deserts of unsounded snow | Brood. Against the
uniformity of suburbia and its automaton inhabitants are placed tower-
ing white expanses as a Rebuttal of the Verities of Bucks.103 This replays
Shelleys Mont Blanc (1817): Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to
repeal, | Large codes of fraud and woe.104 Whereas in Shelleys poem the
mountain lies beyond the works and ways of man, a power dwelling
apart in its tranquillity | Remote, serene, and inaccessible, in MacNeices
even the startlingly aloof Everest is captured as an entertainment to be
watched by the masses: solitudes of height washed out in ux, | A weir
of whirling celluloid. The climbing of Everest offers an alternative to
this commercial packaging of the mountain. MacNeice asserts that the
audience, the groundlings, will never see the point of the answer the
mountaineer George Mallory (who died near the summit in 1924) gave
100
Terence Brown, MacNeices Ireland, MacNeices Islands, in Vincent Newey and
1991), 22538: 2312.
101
Ibid., 236.
102
On the documentary see Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice, 402.
103
104
Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael ONeill
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1204.

when asked why he wanted to climb Everest: because it is there.105
A sense of unease at the direction in which modernity seems to be
heading, in the face of this homogenizing urban sprawl or at the trans-
formation of the mountain into a proxy paradise available to all on lm,
is tempered by the irrational desires driving the individuals ambitions, a
consolation owing something to the qualied mysticism posited in Mac-
Neices earlier study of Yeats.106
Such a celebration of individuality in the face of homogenization recurs
in an overtly regionalist vein in Canto VIII of Autumn Sequel.107 In the
midst of a celebration of the unruliness of art, brought on by a visit to
Londons Tate Gallery, the poet praises Devlin (Jack Dillon, a colleague in
the BBC Features Department) for his ability to nd Where regional and
rural craft endures | Though Transport House and Whitehall cry Caput!
Travelling around England discovering local memory immured in local
stone, Devlin, like the obscene Cerne Abbas giant, has a hunch that
England still is with us. To be found in local folklore and crafts, this
supposedly real England exists in spite of the damaging centralizing diktats
of the government in Whitehall and the ideological drivers of the welfare
state in post-war Britain at Transport Houseat that time the home of
the Labour Party, the Transport and General Workers Union, and the
Trades Union Congress. That England still is with us is to be reckoned
against the fact that London is too, dragging us back on time | To the rule
of desk and hooter. The disempowered life of the modern city-dweller is
despairingly juxtaposed with the older rural ways of life with which Devlin
is familiar.
The voice of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides (a recurring
presence throughout the poem) offers a more even-handed view:
In a modern city,
Too big to be called a city, the facts debar
The citizen much say in what is done
On his behalf or to him. This may jar
On some, it contents others. The average run
Of men prefer a safe but narrow scope,
A place but a small one in a lukewarm sun.
Yet this gesture towards objectivity cannot mask the confusion of Mac-
Neices response to the post-war world in Cantos II and VIII. The poem
proposes both the lonely individual quest of the mountaineer and a retreat
105
106
MacNeice, Poetry of W.B. Yeats, viiviii.
107
Letters Home 105

to the remaining rural places where regional and rural craft endures;
through the voice of Thucydides, however, it then regretfully notes that
men crave a safe but narrow place in the world, which would seem to
undermine some of the impulses elsewhere praised. The poems contra-
dictory thinking is exemplied in its attempt to offer both the local
community and the pioneering individual as some kind of answer to the
automaton masses. That in the early 1950s MacNeice displays such
unease and feels a compulsion to explore alternatives to the conditions
that are inducing it, links him to many of his contemporaries in Ireland, as
well as the broader series of regionalist positions being adopted by writers
across Ireland and Britain.
A possible instance of shared intellectual territory drawn on by both
MacNeice and Hewitt is Lewis Mumfords The Culture of Cities (1938),
cited by Hewitt as an inuence in A North Light, which MacNeice also
seems to have used.108 A huge, idiosyncratic amalgam of history, social
theory, and political polemic, the book argues that the industrial devel-
opments and social upheavals from the fteenth century on have actually
damaged Western civilizations ability to make effective communities: a
seventeenth century Dutch peasant, in his little village, knew more about
the art of living in communities than a nineteenth century municipal
councillor in London or Berlin. Mumford argues that the culmination of
this decline has been the rise and fall of what he describes as the Meg-
alopolis: huge unsustainable cities, marked by a fragmentation into sub-
urbs and slumsevoked by MacNeice in his description of London as a
city Too big to be called a city. As a route out of this malaise Mumford
proposes that: The grasp of the region as a dynamic social reality is a rst
step toward a constructive policy of planning, housing, and urban
renewal. The book more explicitly follows Hewitts agenda than Mac-
Neices, arguing that regional movements generally begin with a dynamic
emotional urge manifested partly in poetry. Yet The Culture of Cities
points to the more general continuities between the work of MacNeice,
Hewitt, and other Irish poets of the period. For all that the poems
MacNeice wrote about India or Greece in Ten Burnt Offerings or of
England in Autumn Sequel appear to turn away from any sense of alle-
giance to Ireland, North or South, as a location or culture, they are still
concerned with the question of how to negotiate the relationship between
the poet and the community, and the poet and place. In the context of a
108
Hewitt, A North Light, 144; Mumfords title appears among a list in one of
MacNeices notebooks that has been misleadingly catalogued: Louis MacNeice, Notes at
Oxford while reading classics, n.d., Harry Ransom Center, (MacNeice, L.) Misc.,
Hanley II.

modern world seemingly driven by the forces of commercialism on the
one hand and the centralized state on the other, in which both the agency
of the individual and a local cultural identity are under threat, MacNeices
poetry attempts to nd alternative cultural positions. A gure with which
to identify, such as Byron, a community to write for, as found through his
friends in Autumn Sequel, or a moment that transcends cultural difference
in a temple in southern India, all answer back to the prevailing critical
discourse of cultural and geographical connection within both Ireland and
England, as well as the wider social, political, and economic forces that, in
turn, were shaping those critical pressures. In pursuing other choices to his
Irish peersand many of his Welsh, Scottish, and English ones tooand
facing criticism in doing so, MacNeice was still subject to similar impulses
and pressures. In many senses he was, at times by design and at times
inadvertently, sending letters home.
4
Irish Characters
A surprising aspect of MacNeices move away from Ireland as a subject

matter in his poetry of the late 1940s and early 1950s is that during this
period he was probably more involved with the work of his Irish contem-
poraries, both professionally and personally, than at any other time in his
career. As already discussed in Chapter 2, at the end of the Second World
War MacNeice stayed in Ireland for several months and mentored new
writers for the BBC in Belfast. It was also announced in November 1945
that he would become poetry editor of the Dublin literary magazine The
Bell, following in the footsteps of Geoffrey Taylor.1 As Terence Brown has
suggested, MacNeices editorship was not a vital one: in some issues no
poems appeared and few of those that did were memorable.2 But the fact
that his editorship was not a success should not obscure the signicance of
it happening at all. If nothing else, it provides further circumstantial
evidence that in writing Woods in 1946 or in sending a poetic letter
home from India in 1947, MacNeice was aware of contemporary trends
within Irish poetry and its accompanying critical discourse. It also points
to his desire to engage with the Irish literary world in imaginative and
practical terms in the immediate aftermath of the war. Through putting
particular poems within the covers of The Bell, MacNeice promoted a
vision of what Irish poetry might be. Few of the poems he chose dealt
with Irish topics directly, as Kelly Matthews notes.3 Whether by luck or
design, though, several do escape or reorientate the pressures placed on
poets to show their connection to the country of Ireland or the region of
Northern Ireland as a badge of poetic identity.
Taylors Two Poems of Landscape, from the June 1946 issue, are a
pair of topographical poems that eschew a movement from the description
1
Editorial Note, The Bell 11.2 (November 1945), 660. MacNeice is last listed as poetry
editor in the May 1947 issue.
2
Terence Brown, MacNeices Ireland, MacNeices Islands, in Vincent Newey and
1991), 2378.
3
Kelly Matthews, The Bell Magazine and the Representation of Irish Identity (Dublin:
Four Courts Press, 2012), 95.

of landscape to a reading of that landscapes cultural signicance.4 The
rst, Autumn Landscape, patiently describes a line of mountains and the
landscape lying below: Under a cloud of indigo-cum-cream | The heights
are purple, pastures bottle-green, | And plough-land gravely luminous
indian red. Drawing on a painterly vocabulary, seen here in the descrip-
tions of colour, the countryside is presented as a historical blank. The poem
is a visual image in words put forward as an end in itself. It nishes its
twenty-nine lines of description with a simple reporting of a storms arrival:
Now comes the rain. This is followed in Landscape from a Hill by the
depiction of an individuals changing perception of a landscape. Today the
factories are hidden by mist and the elds by snow, but on another day
the visible blot of the factories had made the landscape seem a more
approachable, practicable woman. The usual prioritization of a pre-
industrial wilderness or a bucolic idyll within depictions of the Irish
countryside is gently undermined. The speakers response also highlights
the individual rather than collective way in which landscape is experienced
and the changeable natural conditions that shape that experience. The leap
from a description of a landscape to the co-opting of that landscape into the
representation of the nation is avoided; it is presented as alien to the very
nature of landscape and its human perception.
Poems by Roy McFadden and W.R. Rodgers explore obligations other
than to a particular culture or location, highlighting the non-regionalist
aspects of their poetic sensibilities. McFadden printed the two sections of
the poem that would become Forrest Reid separately, just before and
after the novelists death in January 1947.5 An Aged Writer describes
Reid as turning to religious questions on facing death, wishing to unmask
times metaphors and nd | The naked features of eternity; while Forrest
Reid imagines the novelist looking out of a window contemplating what
mystery conceived the wing of a ying gull. Rather than dwelling on Reid
as a Northern Irish novelist, McFadden presents him as a latter-day
mystic. Similarly, Rodgerss Song, from August 1946, falls outside of
any regionalist agenda. A daydream of poetic power, its speaker imagines
producing a word that is a perfectly crafted abstract sound, lling the
addressees ear | With one ute-note so loud, so clear | That never after
could you bear | A sound less apt.6
4
Geoffrey Taylor, Two Poems of Landscape (Autumn Landscape and Landscape
from a Hill), The Bell 12.3 (June 1946), 1912.
5
Roy McFadden, An Aged Writer, The Bell 12.4 (July 1947), 282; Roy McFadden,
Forrest Reid, The Bell 13.6 (March 1947), 31. These were printed together as Forrest Reid
in Roy McFadden, Collected Poems: 19431995, intr. Philip Hobsbaum (Belfast: Lagan,
1996), 257.
6
W.R. Rodgers, Song, The Bell 12.5 (August 1946), 373.
Irish Characters 109

Patrick Kavanaghs Jim Larkin explores a politics of universal ideals
rather than identity.7 Written in tribute to the trade union leader who led
the workers during the Dublin Lockout of 1913 and died in January
1947, it resists considering Larkins achievements within a national
context, focusing instead on the ideas Larkin propagated. Accordingly,
Larkins greatness is not a matter of his famous oratory. His words merely
bore witness | To the coming dawn, by which Kavanagh seems to mean a
growing awareness of the possibilities for all of humanity: The owers are
growing for you. But the crowd turned away from this gure of reality
coming to free them as:
Tyranny trampled them in Dublins gutter,
Until Jim Larkin came along and cried
The call of Freedom and the call of Pride,
And Slavery crept to its hands and knees,
And Nineteen Thirteen cheered from out the utter
Degradation of their miseries.
The capitalization of Reality, Tyranny, Freedom, Pride, and Slav-
ery draws Jim Larkins message out from the particularities of its Dublin
context. The Lockout is represented as part of a wider international
history of working-class emancipation. MacNeices poetry editorship of
The Bell might tentatively be interpreted as an attempt to broaden the
denition of what constitutes Irish poetry, beyond the restrictive terms
of Irish critical debate, as outlined in Chapter 3. Within the periodicals
pages, poetry was relieved of an obligation to attest to its connection to
Ireland or Ulster. Muted pluralism is in play. However, any straightfor-
ward sense of progress in the years to come, in terms of either Mac-
Neices own work or the work of others he helped to publish, was a
complex affair.
As MacNeice and others resisted the spectres of roots and cultural
connection, there arose the chimera of character. In the late 1940s and
early 1950s, this was to be pursued not only in relation to the attempted
capture of the character of Ireland and the staging of Irish characters, but
also the celebration of character or the character in and of itself. Notions
of character were mostly pursued by MacNeice in relation to his work at
the BBC and his close friendship with Rodgers. In Hedli MacNeices
portrait of her late husband, The Story of the House that Louis Built
(1988), she evokes his life through the conceit of an imaginary house.
At the back lies a chamber with space for only himself and a Welsh
poet Dylan Thomas or an Irish W.R. Rodgers. With them he would,
7
Patrick Kavanagh, Jim Larkin, The Bell 13.6 (March 1947), 4.

manuscripts in hand, discuss the making of poetry, but only with them.8
Similarly, when the artist Mercy Hunter (the wife of George MacCann)
recalled MacNeice, she remembered him saying that the only people that
he would ever accept criticism from, you know his peers, were Auden and
W.R. Rodgers.9 While Thomas and Auden are central to critical accounts
of twentieth-century poetry, Rodgers has moved to the periphery. During
the 1940s and 1950s, though, he was critically esteemed and MacNeices
friendship with Rodgers was one of the closest he ever forged with a fellow
poet. MacNeices friendships with Auden and, to a lesser extent, with
Thomas have proved more attractive scholarly propositions, while Mac-
Neice and Rodgerss friendship was at its height when MacNeice was
writing some of his least-admired poems. But if MacNeices difcult
middle stretch and its relationship to Irish poetry are to be understood,
Rodgerss presence needs to be taken into account.10
The two poets rst met at Hunter and MacCanns home in Vinecash,
County Armagh, in the autumn of 1939.11 Rodgers was a Presbyterian
minister in nearby Loughgall at the time, but he had begun writing poems
the previous year after John Hewitt (a friend since student days together at
Queens) had lent him some volumes of contemporary poetry.12 By 1940,
the poems written so far were published as Awake! and Other Poems and,
though the rst printing was destroyed in a bomb raid, a second was issued
a year later and an American edition followed in 1942. The collection
received many positive notices. The Times Literary Supplement com-
mented that Rodgers adapts his style to his subject while always keeping
it his own, playing with words in all seriousness and with delightful
effect.13 A measure of the private enthusiasm which greeted the volume
can be gathered from a copy held among Rodgerss papers that preserves
James Stephenss annotations, including the comment that Rodgers is the
promisingest of our time and already, perhaps, the best.14 A long 1950
article in The Bell by H.A.L. Craig on several of Rodgerss subsequent
8
Hedli MacNeice, The Story of the House that Louis Built, in Jacqueline Genet and
Wynne Hellegouarch, eds, Studies on Louis MacNeice (Caen: Centre de publications de
lUniversit de Caen, 1988), 910.
9
Louis MacNeice, broadcast on the Northern Ireland Home Service, 3 September
1964, BBC Northern Ireland Community Archive, compilation of archive material,
Museum 2714.
10
2007), 349.
11
12
Darcy OBrien, W.R. Rodgers (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1970), 33.
13
[Anon.], review of W.R. Rodgers, Awake! and Other Poems, Times Literary Supplement
2069 (27 September 1941), 487.
14
The Public Record Ofce of Northern Ireland (hereafter PRONI), Rodgers Papers,
D/2833/B/1/N/8/1.

poems, later collected in Europa and the Bull and Other Poems (1952),
claimed that: There is no other modern poet, with the exception of Eliot,
who is so deeply concerned with the details of the craft of poetry.15
MacNeices own enthusiasm for Rodgers as a man and a writer is
suggested by the central role he played in bringing him to the BBC
(discussed in Chapter 2). Having encouraged Rodgers to try to write for
radio, MacNeice returned to Belfast in November 1945 to produce
Rodgerss rst script, City Set on a Hill, a programme about Armagh.
From a congratulatory letter, it is clear that MacNeice was instrumental in
bringing Rodgers to London: thank you again for giving me such an
interesting script to work on [ . . . ] I have told Laurence Gilliam [head of
the Features Department] you would like to take a 3 months contract to
London.16 By June 1946, Rodgers was working at the BBC alongside
MacNeice, who also produced his next programme, Professional Portrait of
a Country Parson, in Belfast that August.17 The two poets shared an ofce
until Rodgers resigned from the corporation in 1952having moved in
with Gilliams wife.18
The titles of Rodgerss rst two features, City Set on a Hill and
Professional Portrait of a Country Parson suggest their regional subject
matter, presenting Northern Ireland and its culture. Rodgers had already
been trying to characterize Northern Ireland for some time. In The Bell in
1942, he published a Conversation Piece on the current situation in
Ulster under the anonymous by-line of An Ulster Protestant, in which
one of the voices states that: in Ulster we have two groups of people. The
barrier between them is a triple one. It is one of religion, of race, and of
class, all coincident. It separates Catholic from Protestant, Gael from
Scotch settler stock, poor from rich.19 A second piece, written for the
New Statesman and Nation a year later, tells its audience that: few English
people know enough about Ireland to make distinctions. Unsettling both
Irish and British audiences, Rodgers bluntly outlines uncomfortable truths
and counters false assumptions. In seeking to delineate one particular set
of characteristics attributable to Catholics and another to Protestants,
however, both articles risk descending into reductive stereotyping. The
15
H.A.L. Craig, Poetry in Ambush: An Article on the Magazine Poetry of W.R.
Rodgers, The Bell 26.3 (December 1950), 2937: 34.
16
Louis MacNeice to W.R. Rodgers, 21 November [1945], PRONI, Rodgers Papers,
D/2833/C/1/17/3.
17
18
Rodgers resigned from the BBC on 15 October 1952, according to a letter of
16 October 1952, PRONI, Rodgers Papers, D/2833/C/3/1/36.
19
An Ulster Protestant [W.R. Rodgers], Conversation Piece, The Bell 4.5 (August
1942), 30514: 307.

Catholic Ulsterman, the readers of the later piece are told, is an emotional
person, open in speech, sinuous and intuitive in mood; while the Ulster
Protestant is a logical, close person, deliberate, sarcastic, rational, and far-
seeing in speech and action. However, that North and South, Protestant
and Catholic, Rodgers states, must come to liveable terms is certain. They
are, by nature, complements of hand and heart. He goes on to predict the
making of a new pattern for Ireland that will be a meeting of equals. For
those in the North (outside of industrial Belfast) and the South are both
peasant people, and, even in opposition, have an instant and intuitive
knowledge of each other that brings with it fear and respect.20 Outlining
these contrasting characters in stark antithetical terms and then stating that
their differences are actually complementary and that both sides are joined
through their class and way of life is an audacious move. It is an act of
plain-speaking and prophecy which makes considerable claims as to the
authors licence and authority in speaking of Northern Ireland for outside
audiences, skirting close to the kind of overreaching condence Rodgers
displayed in his poem Ireland (as discussed in Chapter 2).
Rodgers was not alone in trying to present and explain Northern
Ireland and her People in such terms. Indeed, this is the title of a
typescript written by MacNeice. It was posthumously printed in the
Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice (1990).21 Although that volumes editor
was unsure of its purpose, its fate has since been uncovered by Gillian
McIntosh.22 It was commissioned by the British Council in 1944 as part
of a series of pamphlets on Peoples of the United Kingdom. On being
examined by the Ulster Ofce in London, though, it was found to be
most unsatisfactory.23 Reading the proposed pamphlet it is not hard to
see why. MacNeices opening paragraph immediately draws attention to
the complicated issue of how to demarcate and refer to Northern Ireland:
If you look at a map of Ireland you will nd a small portion in the north-east
(one-sixth of the island) cut off from the rest by an irregular border; this is
Northern Ireland, otherwise known as the Six Counties or, sometimes,
Ulster. It is to be noted however that this area excludes three counties of the
old province of Ulster and, incidentally, the most northerly part of Ireland,
which is in County Donegal.
20
W.R. Rodgers, Black North, The New Statesman and Nation 256 (20 November
1943), 3313.
21
Louis MacNeice, Northern Ireland and her People (c. 1944), in Selected Prose of
Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 14353.
22
Gillian McIntosh, The Force of Culture: Unionist Identities in Twentieth-Century
Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), 2035.
23
The Ulster Ofce, London, to the Northern Irish Cabinet Publicity Committee,
April 1944, PRONI, CAB 9F/123/34, repr. in McIntosh, Force of Culture, 205.

He goes on to be frank about political violence: the Northern Irish are the
only people in the United Kingdom who in our own time have been
accustomed to hear gunre in their streets. The sectarian nature of the
political divisions are also discussed, with MacNeice noting that because
the majority of unionists are Protestants and the majority of nationalists
are Catholics: As one person out of three in Northern Ireland is a Catholic
it will be understood why this minority, which can never either be
submerged or come to power, is a frequent occasion of dissension.
While openly acknowledging the divisions in Northern Irish society, he
takes the politically contentious step of pointing to unifying factors
between the North and South of Ireland, such as a shared sense of the
English as foreign: Northern and Southern Irish, Protestant and Catholic,
will in most cases club together in the presence of an Englishman.
Furthermore, the piece ends with the hope for further understanding
and reconciliation (national unity imagined once again through song)
offered by the recruitment of Catholics and Protestants from north and
south of the border into the British army during the waritself a sensitive
subject for the Northern Ireland government:
It is a fact that these men, brought up in opposing camps, drop their mutual
suspicion and latent hostility as soon as they get in the same unit; all that
remains is badinageSing us one of your blank rebel songs, or Sing us one
of your blank Orange ballads. May we hope that the Good Haters are ripe to
disappear and that the Decent Wee Men, from all quarters, are ready at last
to sink their differences.
It was Rodgerss subsequent pamphlet, The Ulstermen and their Country
(1947), which was approved by the political authorities and distributed by
the British Council.24 Rodgers later admitted that mention of politics was
forbidden and it had been blue-pencilled by the Ulster Government
Ofce, but underlined that it was still the rst time the authorities had
allowed ofcial mention of the existence of a CatholicProtestant prob-
lem.25 McIntosh draws parallels between MacNeice and Rodgers, arguing
that they were part of a broader effort in the 1940s to provide an
alternative version of Northern Irish culture against the backdrop of,
and often in contrast to, ofcial commemorations and ofcial literature.26
However, this viewpoint elides the cultural stereotyping that the ethno-
graphic mode pursued by both writers reinforces as well as challenges.
24
W.R. Rodgers, The Ulstermen and their Country (London: Longmans, Green and Co.,
for the British Council, 1947).
25
W.R. Rodgers to Dan Davin, 3 April 1949, OUP archives, OP/5561, qtd in
McIntosh, The Force of Culture, 202.
26
McIntosh, The Force of Culture, 180.

MacNeice, in his rejected pamphlet, relies on drawing a sharp distinction
between the Dublin and Belfast Irish character:
With a Dubliner you feel you know him after a rst meeting but you
probably will know him no better after a year; the Belfastman on the other
hand has practically no window-dressing, he presents you at rst with a
blank wall, after some time you discover a door, later stillthat is, if he trusts
youthe door may be opened, in the end you may nd you have got inside
his character.27
This reinterprets the reserve of the stereotypical Belfastman as a virtue, a
sign of their fundamental openness, as opposed to the Dubliners super-
cial but ultimately distancing bonhomie. As with some of MacNeices
responses to India, he is drawn into a discourse of cultural denition,
stylistically signposted here by antithesis and paradox. The manifest
deciencies of MacNeices pamphlet, as Peter McDonald argues, are
close to those of:
Rodgers on the Ulster character, or to certain of Hewitts recurring themes.
Trying to serve up an easily comprehensible identity for Northern Ireland,
MacNeice has recourse to the techniques of regionalist analysis, the com-
bination of simplication with generalizations, and ignores as far as possible
those areas which prove recalcitrant to such an approach.28
MacNeice and Rodgerss convergent interests in Irish character and
identity are borne out by their work in the BBC Features Department.
MacNeices correspondence, for instance, records that the pair undertook
a great Eire expedition for the BBC in July 1947the month before he
travelled to India.29 This developed into a tour of the south and west of
Ireland with a recording unit by Rodgers, preparing programmes of Irish
talks and stories, that was covered that September in the diary pages of
The Irish Times, which also noted the guiding role played by Ernie
OMalley in facilitating the recordings.30 As well as his programmes on
Northern Ireland, Rodgers was now seeking to present aspects of southern
Irish culture to BBC audiences, playing not only the part of the radio (as
opposed to stage) Irishman, but also acting as an impresario. In a draft of a
BBC memo from around 1948, Rodgers proposes another trip to form
contacts with Irish writers willing to write for radio. He suggests that two
27
Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, 144.
28
Peter McDonald, Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1997), 35.
29
Louis MacNeice to Ruth Jones, 26 May [1947], in Letters of Louis MacNeice, ed.
30
Nichevo, An Irishmans Diary, The Irish Times (6 September 1947), 7.

seams may be tapped: The colourful (ach!) seam of Irish local life and
idiosyncratic happening, vividly expressed, into which most scripts will
t, and a wider seam of European consciousness.31 The names of possible
contributors included the storyteller Bryan McMahon, the folklorist
Michael Murphy, Padraic Fallon, and Conor Cruise OBrien. Rodgerss
notes from the resultant nine-day trip also record him meeting many other
Irish writers, including Frank OConnor, Maurice Craig, Patrick Kava-
nagh, Sen OFaolin, Brinsley MacNamara, and Geoffrey Taylor in
Dublin, and John Hewitt, Roy McFadden, Joseph Tomelty, John
D. Stewart, and Michael McLaverty in Belfast.32 This underlines the
role of envoy to the Dublin and Belfast literary worlds that Rodgers, and
to a lesser extent MacNeice, took on within the BBC Features Depart-
ment: a later Irish Times diary from 1950 referred to the pair as those
prominent Irish pillars of the B.B.C. Third Programme; and John Mon-
tagues memoirs recollect MacNeice and his side-kick Rodgers passing
through Dublin, usually to record BBC radio programmes on the past,
on the great dead gures of the Literary Revival, a dangerously seductive
pair cruising from the Tower bar (the Radio Eireann pub in Henry
Street) to the Pearl.33 This role of BBC envoy is apparent in the pro-
grammes that Rodgers produced, such as a reading of OConnors trans-
lation of The Midnight Court in September 1947; Between the Two of Us,
a drama about J.M. Synge by Fallon in May 1950; and H.A.L. Craigs
centenary portrait of Thomas Moore (played by C. Day Lewis) in March
1952.34 Fallons was one of three programmes on Synge produced by
Rodgers that May, which also included a reminiscence of Synge in Paris
by Richard Best (the former director of the National Library of Ireland)
and Rodgerss own The Bare Stones of Aran, the notice for which
proclaims:
31
W.R. Rodgers, BBC memo, c. 1948, PRONI, Rodgers Papers, D/2833/C/4/1/60.
Though undated, this draft memo mentions news that in the near future Yeatss body is to
be transferred from France to Sligoa natural point for a programme. Yeatss body was
reburied in Sligo in September 1948 and his widow George began the negotiations to bring
his body there in January 1948, making it likely that Rodgerss memo dates from 1948. See
R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, II: The Arch Poet, 19151939 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003), 6567.
32
W.R. Rodgers, notes on trip to Dublin, PRONI, Rodgers Papers, D/2833/C/4/1/60.
33
Quidnunc, An Irishmans Diary, The Irish Times (18 January 1950), 5; John
Montague, Company: A Chosen Life (London: Duckworth, 2001), 39.
34
Broadcast on BBC Third Programme, 14 September 1947, 29 May 1950, and
4 March 1952. See: Radio Times 96.1248 (1420 September 1947) and 107.1389 (28
May3 June 1948); The Bell 18.2 (May 1952), 6989. Thanks to Elizabeth Robertson for
drawing my attention to much of Rodgerss Irish-themed output on the Third Programme.

West of Ireland, on the bleak and stony edge of Europe, lie the Aran Islands.
With prodigious labour and hardship, generations of Islanders have covered
the bare rocks with soil, and this wilderness of stone has become one of the
richest and most colourful pockets of Gaelic life and tradition.35
Such material featured in much of Rodgerss radio work, as he not only
characterized Ireland but also broadcast Irish characters. The notice for his
1948 programme The Irish Storyteller is more neutrally ethnographic in
tone, but still presents the west of Ireland as an exotic curio:
On the western fringes of Europe are fast vanishing evidences of a civilization
that once covered the whole Atlantic area. Its literature was oral; and the
storyteller with his sagas and wonder-tales was the book, the newspaper, and
the lm of his society. This programme presents the fading picture of
storytelling today. The Gaelic recordings were made by a BBC recording
unit in the course of a recent Irish journey.36
This depiction of Ireland as a land of vivid incident and talkers was
transferred to the pubs and parlours of Dublin in Rodgerss series of Irish
Literary Portraits on Yeats, Joyce, George Moore, Synge, Shaw, Oliver
St John Gogarty, F.R. Higgins, and AE (George Russell), broadcast between
1949 and 1965. To make them, Rodgers sought out and recorded remin-
iscences of these writers, before painstakingly editing them to produce a
collage of memories and stories circling around the gures, with the gaps
lled in by his narration. The rst feature on Yeats, for example, edited
together the impressions of, among others, Maud Gonne MacBride, Iseult
Stuart, Anne Yeats, Austin Clarke, and Lennox Robinson, as well as present-
ing an amusing argument between Frank OConnor and Sen OFaolin:
ofaolain: I have no doubt that probably Yeats sitting at his desk and
writing his poetry was, as it were, perfectly natural and innocent with
himself so long as he didnt let that thing infect him. The outward signs
were in his manner of dress: the cane, the lovely grey suit, the carefully
chosen colours, the long hair, the owing tie. All that theatrical pose must
have come between him and his own natural self.
oconnor: Bless my soulthat a mans taste in shirts stands
between him and his own natural selfwhere is art getting to?37
35
Broadcast on BBC Third Programme, 301 May 1948, Radio Times 107.1389
(28 May3 June 1948).
36
Notice for The Irish Storyteller, broadcast on BBC Third Programme, 13 June 1948,
Radio Times 99.1287 (1319 June 1948).
37
W.R. Rodgers, ed., Irish Literary Portraits, intr. Conor Cruise OBrien (New York:
Taplinger, 1973), 5.

Rodgers and his producer Maurice Browns method of editing and
splicing together recorded conversations was groundbreaking. It captured,
as Rodgers put it, the small talk of literary Dublin in all its staring
contradictions, its instant regurgitations of living memory, its fascinating
paradoxes that would not lie at on the page of history.38 Whatever their
value as oral history may be, however, these features repackage Irish
literature as anecdote, offering a further shift from the depiction of the
character of Ireland to the staging of Irish characters. The work of writers
such as Yeats, Joyce, Synge, or Moore serves as little more than a backdrop
for the performance of amusing gossip. Their complex artistic and intel-
lectual achievements become another colourful seam of Irish life, an idio-
syncratic happening, vividly expressed for BBC listeners. As Kavanagh
responded at the time, having listened to the 1952 portrait of Moore:
There we had a crowd mainly of mediocrities and less, being funny at
the expense of one of the few authentic writers who happened to live in
Dublinwhere he never belongedfor a few years.39
MacNeices BBC output was less obviously focused on Ireland. Besides
his programmes on India, he wrote many features and plays in which
Ireland played no part, including adaptations of Icelandic sagas, a trans-
lation of Goethes Faust, and several programmes responding to Athens.40
But some of the radio work that he was involved with during the later
1940s and early 1950s did touch on Ireland. He produced programmes
such as Valentin Iremongers Wrap Up My Green Jacket in 1947, a verse-
feature dealing with the relationship between Robert Emmet and Sarah
Curran, which was reprinted in The Bell, and Sen OFaolins Return to
Cork in 1948.41 A series of reminiscences of the authors childhood
and youth in Cork, OFaolins broadcast begins with a warning about
the dangers of returning to a locale from ones past: Its never the same
place. You are never the same person. To come back to Erin is for every
man like looking into a mirror and saying Good God, can this be me?
This sobering advice forms a prelude to an atypical exploration of an
Irish writers roots. Rather than landscape or native culture, OFaolin
38
Ibid., xi.
39
Patrick Kavanagh, Sex and Christianity, Kavanaghs Weekly (24 May 1952), repr. in
Kavanagh, A Poets Country: Selected Prose, ed. Antoinette Quinn (Dublin: Lilliput Press,
2003), 1703: 170.
40
The fullest listing to date of MacNeices work for radio is included in Louis MacNeice:
The Classical Radio Plays, ed. Amanda Wrigley and S.J. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2013).
41
Valentin Iremonger, Wrap Up My Green Jacket, broadcast on BBC Home Service, 3
February 1947, printed in The Bell 14.4 (July 1947), 329; Sen OFaolin, Return to Cork,
broadcast on BBC Third Programme, 15 November 1948, New York Public Library, Berg
Collection, 63B3597 (MacNeice).

points to the inuence of the Cork Opera House opposite the pub above
which he lived:
Opposite this riverside pub was the most important event in my lifethe
stage-door of the Cork Opera House and the round apse of the wall at
the back of the stage. From our side-window I would stare at that wall, and
see right through it, as if it were made of glass, an endless shadow-world that
was more real to me than any reality.
OFaolin nds that his creative origins offered him a route to a world
beyond his immediate circumstances. The spur to his imagination was the
dream of art itself. He goes on to look back fondly on life in Cork under
the British:
Army, navy, commerce, the sea, politicsthe whole of the cosmopolite
world of an Atlantic port was hourly laid at my feet. The whole boiling
British Empire, in fact was held out on a plate to any young fellow who cared
to adventure into it.
Life in Cork is presented as having been nourished through being well-
connected to the wider world via the British Empire. In contrast, after
Irish independence the city has reverted to its small-scale life, petty,
provincial and unimportant [ . . . ] an empty harbour, the world shut
out, the gates closed and the keys rusting in the bottom of the river.42
The past was surely not as rosy as OFaolins reinterpretation of British
rule and mass emigration might suggest, but the indictment of Irelands
post-independence isolation is at one with OFaolins wider project to
demythologize Ireland, as earlier pursued in The Bell. For all its sense of
the hazards of romanticizing Ireland, though, this attempt to represent
Cork to BBC audiences resembles Rodgerss characterization of Irish life.
The warning about the dangers of returning home and the criticism of the
isolation of present-day Ireland sit uneasily with the programmes nostal-
gic reliance on what its Radio Times listing describes as dramatised
vignettes of old Cork characters.43 As with much mid-century writing,
OFaolins rejection of the myth of Ireland is undermined by his struggle
to nd a style that does not itself recongure the myth in other terms.44
42
Ibid.
43
Listing for Return to Cork, Radio Times 101.1309 (1420 November).
44
On OFaolins earlier interactions with the BBC, see: Niall Carson, The Barbaric
Note: Sen OFaolins Early Years at the BBC, Irish University Review 43.2 (2013),
398413. OFaolins attempts to overcome such a stylistic impasse in his ction are
explored in: Mark Quigley, Empires Wake: Postcoloniality and the Politics of Modern Literary
Form (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 65121.

MacNeice was, of course, only the producer of OFaolins feature,
which seems initially to have been commissioned by Rodgers.45 But
during this period MacNeice also had ambitions to write programmes of
his own about Ireland. He suggested a feature on the Battle of Clontarf in
May 1952.46 In a BBC memo from January 1953, he proposed to
squeeze in a visit to do some research on the feature, visiting the site of
the battle and consulting the T.C.D. authorities and also Delargy and
Sean OSullivan of the Irish Folklore Commission for historical dope.
He also discussed a programme on Irish Tinkers, who speak their own
language gammon which is quite distinct from Romany. I feel there is
the makings of a very interesting feature here and I should like to discuss
this with Sam Hanna Bell and E.W.J. Boucher in Belfast. In this same
memo he proposed a programme on F.R. Higgins, as mentioned in
Chapter 2.47 None of these programmes seems to have been made at the
time, although MacNeice did later write a play about the Battle of
Clontarf, They Met on Good Friday, broadcast in 1959.48 It was Rodgers
who went on to produce a programme on Higgins in 1964, as part of his
Irish Literary Portraits series.49 In some senses, MacNeice in this memo
was playing the part of Rodgers, soon after he had resigned from the BBC
in October 1952, and taking on the role of the Features Departments
Irish envoy. It was Rodgers who had rst forged links with J.H. Delargy,
head of the Irish Folklore Commission, in making The Irish Storyteller in
1948, and who had proposed making a Tinker programme with the help
of Ernie OMalley in 1947.50 Rodgers also at times became MacNeices
Irish literary intermediary. Robert Greacen, when co-editing the Faber
anthology Contemporary Irish Poetry (1949), not only sent Rodgers his
own page proofs but also enclosed the proofs for three of Mr. MacNeices
poems, enquiring if he has any idea when Mr. MacN. is producing my
wifes Maria Edgeworth script.51 After leaving the BBC Rodgers seems to
have continued in this role, writing in a letter to Hewitt after Thomass
death in 1953: Louis says that if you wish it for your Telegraph page, he
45
Sen OFaolin to W.R. Rodgers, 6 December 1957, D/2833/C/1/21/6.
46
Coulton, Louis MacNeice at the BBC, 126.
47
Louis MacNeice to BBC features organizer, 21 January 1953, Bodleian Library,
MacNeice Papers, Box 20.
48
Louis MacNeice, They Met on Good Friday (1959), repr. in Selected Plays of Louis
MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser and Peter McDonald (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993),
261302.
49
Rodgers, ed., Irish Literary Portraits, 16984.
50
Stella Hillier [BBC features organizer] to W.R. Rodgers, 19 August 1947, PRONI,
Rodgers Papers, D/2833/C/3/1/8.
51
Robert Greacen to W.R. Rodgers, 6 February 1948, PRONI, Rodgers Papers, D/
2833/C/1/6/2.

will write you a piece about Dylan Thomas.52 The radio Irishman culture
at large in the BBC was later satirized in Anthony Cronins novel The Life
of Riley (1964). It depicts a group of London radio Celts who gather in a
pub called the Stork (presumably modelled on the Stag, a pub near
Broadcasting House frequented by Rodgers, MacNeice, and their col-
leagues), including gures that resemble certain characteristics of both
poets:
The group among which Coosins stood proclaimed loyalty to the ould sod
by the tweediness of their talk, no less than by the tweeds they wore. That
the sod in their case was mostly the black north; that every last man jack of
them was Protestant to the back teeth, hindered their enthusiasm not at all.
Indeed as I grew acquainted with them, I was to discover that so far from
hampering their style, or bringing a blush of shame to their cheeks, their
membership of the traditionally oppressing class seemed to drive them on to
a veritable frenzy, a sort of dervish dance of Irishry, which was to me a
wonder to behold.53
By 1952 Rodgers and MacNeice were further entwined through their
co-editorship of The Character of Ireland, a book it would take them the
rest of their lives not to complete.54 Having published The Character of
England (1947), edited by Ernest Barker, Dan Davin at the Oxford
University Press invited Rodgers in 1949 to produce a book to be called
The Character of Ireland which would consist of a group of essays by
various hands for us on various aspects of Ireland.55 MacNeice agreed to
co-edit and Davin hoped the collection would transcend the ssion of its
subject, and display the real order which kept the dance of electrons
contained.56 By 1952 an impressive list of contributors had been assem-
bled, including Frank OConnor on Irish literature, Elizabeth Bowen on
the big house, Estyn Evans on the countryman, Arland Ussher on the Irish
rebel, Maurice Craig on architecture in Ireland, J.C. Beckett on the
Church of Ireland, and John Hewitt on the visual arts in Ireland.57
However, the volume did not progress as planned: year followed year
with some new delay always appearing, as contributors failed to deliver or
withdrew and as articles went out of date and needed to be revised.58 The
biggest procrastinators of all were the editors themselves. In place of an
52
W.R. Rodgers to John Hewitt, 13 November 1953, PRONI, Hewitt Papers,
D/3838/3/17A.
53
Anthony Cronin, The Life of Riley (London: Secker and Warburg, 1964), 154.
54
55
Dan Davin to W.R. Rodgers, 1 April 1949, PRONI, Rodgers Papers, D/2833/D/12/5/3.
56
Dan Davin, Closing Times (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 47.
57
The Character of Ireland les, OUP Archives, OP/2259.
58
Davin, Closing Times, 31.

introduction or conclusion, MacNeice was to write a verse prologue and
Rodgers a verse epilogue. MacNeices poem only arrived in 1959; Rodgers
never completed his. The collaboration in failure of The Character of
Ireland, as McDonald describes it, only appears to have nally ground to
a halt after Rodgerss death in 1969.59
The very title The Character of Ireland implies an ethnographic
project, an attempt to dene and represent Ireland, which was at one
with Rodgerss journalism and radio work. His poetry was a different
matter. For all the bombast of the opening of Ireland (O these lakes and
all gills that live in them [ . . . ] Are part and parcel of me), his poems
generally did not speak of or to Ireland, or Ulster. Indeed, despite his
frequent identication by others as a rooted Ulster poet, in contrast to
MacNeice, Rodgers only published one poem, Armagh (There is a
through-otherness about Armagh), which might bear comparison with
the poetry of Hewitt or McFadden as being overtly regionalist. A writer
of ne religious poems such as Lent and unusual love poems of both
despair and ecstasy, such as Paired Lives and The Net, Rodgerss
attempt to turn more fully to the subject of Ireland in his epilogue was a
failure.60 By the end of 1962 Davin was threatening to call the whole
project off. In May 1963, Rodgers sent some nished lines with prose
notes about how the gaps were to be lled. But a nished version never
materialized and Davin recalls Rodgers last writing to him in 1967, by
which time he had moved to California, promising its arrival in a week.
First published as a chastening introduction to the poets posthumous
Collected Poems, Davins memoir suggests that the problem of the Epi-
logue was central to Rodgers himself, as he attempted to reconcile all his
discrete attitudes to Ireland:
Mary Magdalen would have been the Virgin and there would have been an
Ireland such as Wolfe Tone imagined, where North and South could be one,
when Catholics digging with the left foot and Protestants with the right
would no longer dig one anothers graves except in friendship, and where a
new past could be created with room for priest and presbyter written large or
small, a past with room in the same Irish mind for Carson and for Michael
Collins.
Such a poem could not have been written in this world, not even in the
last refuge of California.61
59
McDonald, Mistaken Identities, 37.
60
W.R. Rodgers, Collected Poems, with an introductory memoir by Dan Davin (Lon-
don: Oxford University Press, 1971), 423, 91, 75, 20, 84.
61
Davin, Closing Times, 345, 39, 412.

Davin interweaves Rodgerss failure to write the epilogue with a poignant
sense of its place within the general waning of Rodgerss creative powers.
The years after leaving the BBC had not been kind. He had been a
slow writer at the best of times, but the poems almost stopped coming
altogether: Rodgerss 1971 posthumous Collected Poems contains only ten
poems completed after the publication of his second and nal collection
Europa and the Bull and Other Poems (1952). His freelance radio
work, despite the occasional highlight, such as The Return Room, his
1955 play drawing on his Belfast childhood, became increasingly repeti-
tious. His 1954 programme A Certain Party, for instance, a rehashing
of his Irish Literary Portraits series, was a Dublin perambulation recall-
ing some notable talkers, which closed with the tired paradox that: The
Irish are the warmest of people yet, at the most convivial moment, they
will y from the hug-me-tight of emotion as if from the arms and
favours of death.62 The late 1950s saw him repeatedly return to the
airwaves to muse about the nature of Northern Ireland in programmes
such as The Red Hand has Green Fingers, a rose-tinted look at the
relationships between Catholics and Protestants in rural Northern Ire-
land (A peasant community must dramatize itself, must take sides, must
have friction and clash within it if it is to keep the spark of life), and the
series Ulster Journey, which each week featured Rodgerss impressions on
travelling around a different county of the province.63 His correspondence
with the BBC also reveals details of missed deadlines and returned
advances for many scripts that he proposed but did not manage to
nish.64
Yet rather than simply taking its place in the story of Rodgerss decline,
the epilogue seems partly to have been its cause. On considering the
remaining fragments of the poem (a version of which was printed at the
end of the posthumous Collected Poems), McDonald suggests the poems
failure may not be the result of a deciency of imaginative and intellectual
resources, but rather the outcome of applying those resources to what is a
phantom subjectto what the poet calls, in a letter accompanying his
Epilogue, my favourite theme, the characteristics of Irishmen.65 This
phantom recurs throughout Rodgerss prose and radio work. Part of
Rodgerss difculty in pursuing it in poetry was that the epilogue to
62
W.R. Rodgers, A Certain Party, broadcast on 26 April 1954, BBC Written Archives,
Radio Talks Scripts Pre-1970, ROC-ROS T442.
63
W.R. Rodgers, The Red Hand has Green Fingers, broadcast on 27 October 1957, and
Ulster Journey, broadcast 9 September7 October 1958, BBC Written Archives, Radio
Talks Scripts Pre-1970, ROC-ROS T442.
64
See BBC correspondence, PRONI, D/2833/C/3/1.
65

The Character of Ireland was also to have been his Summa, as Davin
astutely notes.66 It would not only have to be about Irelands identity but
also somehow reconcile and embody his own. On being asked if his poetry
was still rooted in Ulster life in a 1964 radio interview, Rodgers reveal-
ingly replied that in my poetry I feel that I have never even begun to write
about the North of Ireland [ . . . ] what I want to do is really a long
autobiographical poem about the North of Ireland.67 This poem was
possibly the unnished epilogue, which struggles under the pressure of
attempting to meld aspects of Rodgerss autobiography with an encapsu-
lation of Ireland and its people. It opens with a character sketch (Here
I come [ . . . ] A good man for a funeral or a wake), exploring the language
passed on to Rodgers by his parents, but quickly broadens out to proclaim
in full bardic cry: I am Ulster, my people an abrupt people | Who like the
spiky consonants in speech | And think the soft ones cissy. The poem
breaks down entirely when Rodgers tries not only to cross south of the
border to Dublin, but also, as its notes promise, weep by the side of the
Thames for the Born, for the Emigrants, for the writing on the North
Wall, for the country that couldnt contain its own.68 Rodgers is some-
how to be the whole of Ulster, the city of Dublin, and the Irish diaspora
too, a character whose life and self performs the whole Irish story. As
Gerald Dawe comments of Rodgerss writing more generally, you sense
how emblematic cultural options can take up a poets time and get in the
way of the real job that is staring him in the face.69
The prospective poem in the notes reveals that Rodgers is to become the
character of Ireland, not only representing but also performing Ireland in
a deadening bind of double identication. His doomed promise to start on
his favourite theme, the characteristics of Irishmen is to be illustrated
with an imagined re-run of his Irish Literary Portraits: Yeats talking about
Synge; Synge talking about Yeats; OConnell about himself; Fox about
Burke. Rodgers will not just describe the characteristics of Irishmen, but
also have Irishmen perform Irishness. Once again, the content of certain
Irish individuals intellectual, artistic, or political achievements gets side-
lined in favour of their recreation as examples of Irish character. In his
correspondence to Davin about the project, Rodgers starts to become a
victim of this emphasis, taking on the role of radio Irishman. In a 1957
66
Davin, Closing Times, 41.
67
W.R. Rodgers, Boyhood in Belfast, recorded on 16 November 1964, BBC Northern
Ireland Community Archive, compilation of archive material, Museum 5923.
68
Rodgers, Collected Poems, 1479.
69
Gerald Dawe, The Parochial Idyll: W.R. Rodgers in The Proper Word: Collected
CriticismIreland, Poetry, Politics, ed. Nicholas Allen (Omaha: Creighton University Press,
2007), 18792: 192.

letter, for example, having recently returned from a visit to Dublin,
Rodgers is brimming with garrulous charm and amusing anecdote:
Young man, said AE to Joyce who undergraduately brought his poems,
written on purple paperpurple birds of passagefor AE to give an opinion
on, Young man, you have not enough chaos in you to be a poet. Only an
Ulsterman, like AE, would ever know the importance of having a predes-
tined chaos. We dont want order, said Harry Brogan (the Abbey actor, the
only one) to me, at the end of the most drunken night I ever spent in Dublin
[ . . . ] We dont want order. And we dont want disorder. What we want is
orderly disorder. I dont know, says he (describing a gure of eight on the
table with his wet pint of stout), how it adds up. But it does.70
In contrast to Rodgerss performance of character in his long, digres-
sion-lled, handwritten letters to Davin, MacNeices few letters are brief,
business-like, and typed; when MacNeice takes an interest in the project,
some progress is made. More generally, MacNeice also avoids becoming
trapped within the effort of either characterizing Ireland or becoming a
character. Placing his work from the early 1950s in relation to the sorry
story of The Character of Ireland is somewhat harder than with Rodgers.
Moreover, the long poems in Ten Burnt Offerings and Autumn Sequel
(1954) do not obviously fall in step with Rodgerss work. The difculties
of these poems, however, are related to Rodgers and the failed joint project
in less direct ways. MacNeices work at the BBC relied, as Robyn Marsack
points out, on the technique of the representative voice. MacNeice
approached most of his features programmes through a collection of
voices that could counterpoint impressions and offer facts relevant to
their perspective [ . . . ] each with its distinguishing trick of style, and
also vignettes of character or landscape features.71 As McDonald argues,
MacNeices need to invest in character and identity at this time was
also manifesting itself through his involvement with The Character of
Ireland, a need that can also be linked to Rodgerss and MacNeices
employment of vignettes of character.72 If MacNeice did not write as
an Irish character, he still, like Rodgers, showed a related interest in
character itself. This can be traced back to the representations of character
types in several of MacNeices wartime poems, such as The Conscript or
The Libertine in Springboard (1944), and continues in Ten Burnt Offer-
ings, with its extended portraits of conicted individuals. It is in Autumn
70
W.R. Rodgers to Dan Davin, 16 March 1957, OUP Archives, OP/1859; Davin,
Closing Times, 334.
71
72

Sequel, though, that MacNeice displays more overtly Rodgers-like
impulses. In praising his friends, MacNeice views their individuality as a
form of oppositional integrity in relation to the homogenizing forces at
large in post-war Britain. Even when praising them as makers, his focus is
on their character rather than their achievements.
Autumn Sequels portrayal of Thomas, who died during the course of
the autumn in question, is a case in point. Under the name Gwilym he
rst appears, while still alive, in Canto II. He is presented by MacNeice in
the pub in the character of the quintessential poet:
analogues
And double meanings crawl behind his ears
And his brown eyes were scooped out of the bogs,
A jester and a bard.
Thomas continues in this role as poet, portrayed as a roguish artist on
the run from worldly obligations. He drowns that spider money in its
wells of glass or pewter, playing the part of the Romantic poet-as-rebel,
drinking as a performative counter-gesture against the stiing pressures of
the modern world. He is also not only a character but the creator of
characters, powerful friends | Who are his own inventions. These are
presented as an extension of his poetic ability, through force of character
and through being a character, to override logic and prove that two and
two do not make four. This performance seems more important than his
actual poetry. This is underlined when the now dead Thomas is mourned
in Canto XVII. Tribute is played to his craft (he would not botch a
verse), yet it is his talking voice, A whole masque | Of tones and
cadences, to which MacNeice returns.73
Thomas is not only portrayed by MacNeice in the role of poet, but also
as a semi-Irish poet. As Terence Brown shows, at several points Autumn
Sequel links Dylan Thomas with Irish poetry and with Ireland.74 The
description of Thomass brown eyes as scooped out of the bogs evokes
Irish as well as Welsh landscapes. The connection is reinforced when
MacNeice holidays in Wales and nds it a half way home, describing it
in terms that evoke stereotypes of the Irish west, with her moodiness,
madness, shrewdness, lewdness, feyness, | Daily demands a different
colour of praise.75 MacNeices subsequent account of Thomass funeral
also overtly links the poet to Irish poetry through the gure of Yeats.
73
74
Terence Brown, The Irish Dylan Thomas: Version and Inuences, Irish Studies
Review 17.1 (February 2009), 4554: 47.
75

While travelling to a Wales located in the misty west, MacNeice notices
that he is wearing the shoes that he bought with Thomas ve years earlier
to attend the interment of Yeatss remains at Drumcliff. MacNeice goes
on, as Brown notes, to make Thomas a poet of place as Yeats is often
made the poet of his native Sligo:
an open book
Of sands and waters, silver and shining brown,
His estuary spreads before us and its birds
To which he gave renown reect renown
On him, their cries resolve into his words
Just as, upon the right, Sir Johns just hill
Looks now, and justly, Gwilyms.76
The topography of Laugharne described, with an estuary spread before
and Sir Johns Hill to the right, parallels the scene in Drumcliff church-
yard, with an estuary on one side and Ben Bulben on the other. Thomas
becomes not only a poet of place but a Yeatsian poet of a Yeatsian place.
There is more at stake than the fact that Thomas wrote about a particular
part of Wales; these lines engage with how a poet achieves enduring value
or power in posterity. The poem asserts a relationship between poetic
survival and Thomass identication with this small corner of Wales.
What he took from here survives in his work, but this process also enacts a
transformation on this Welsh landscape. Thomass character is imposed
upon it: the sands and water are not represented in his book, they have
become his book; the estuary is now his; the birds reect his renown and
their cries are his words. In death this landscape is him. MacNeices
memorializing verse literalizes the metaphorical sense of a poet making a
place his or her own.
A similar correlation between poetry, character, and landscape occurs in
Autumn Sequel when MacNeices initial response to the news of Thomass
death leads him to think of F.R. Higgins. Like Thomas, Higgins is
depicted as a character able to strike back against the worlds pressures
through drunken merriment and poor timekeeping (hours on hours of
Rabelaisian mirth). The poem also emphasizes that Connaughts brown
bogwater and blue | Hills followed Higgins through Dublin. Formed by
a suitable landscape and able to mix the virtues of craft, lyricism and
gossip, the two poets mutual opposition to the prosy world seems to
stem from their shared Celtic roots in an amalgamated WelshIrish
misty west.77 Following Higginss appearance, the end of Canto XVIII
76
Brown, Irish Dylan Thomas, 48; MacNeice, Collected Poems, 463.
77
Ibid., 455.

compares Thomass death with the fates of Sir Patrick Spens, King Arthur,
and Deirdre and Naisi, as if to summon into existence, as Brown
suggests, a Celtic confederacy against ever-encroaching mediocrity, bur-
eaucracy, and mechanization that are excoriated in the work as a whole.78
Indeed, while MacNeice is hibernicizing Thomas in Autumn Sequel,
Thomas might also be viewed as hibernicizing MacNeice. The admiration
for Thomass character leads to a distortion of Yeatss poetry. The case
Yeats made in certain poems for arts endurance beyond the vicissitudes of
time and death is merged with the depiction of Yeats as a bard of the west,
an idea emphasized by many contemporaneous Irish critics, including
Higgins:
Ireland was the moulder of Yeatss mind, as it eventually became the
sounding board for most of his verse and the great stimulating impact on
his life. [ . . . ] From boyhood W.B. Yeats intimately knew his romantic and
pastoral Sligo; later ClareGalway became more attractive to the growing
austerity of his mind. All through life his thought was never far from the
West of Ireland.79
This idea of Yeats reached its culmination in the reburial of his remains in
Sligo, an occasion at which a heavily hungover MacNeice irreverently
suggested that the wrong body had been brought from France.80 Five
years later his poetry reverently xes Thomas within such an identication
of place and poet.
Doing so ameliorates the astringencies of the relationship between art
and place, and art and nature, in Yeatss late work. In Coole Park, 1929
the speaker meditates upon great works constructed at Lady Gregorys
house. The nal stanza, imagining the houses future destruction, com-
mands future readers to nd a point of endurance in the poem itself:
Here, traveller, scholar, poet, take your stand. The poem advocates a
turn towards something formed and willed, as embodied in its
very stanzas, in contrast to natures shapeless and broken forms.81
McDonald outlines how:
The traveller, scholar, poet of the future, who are the scholars and . . . poets
after us of the rst stanza, are addressed and commanded from a site which
accommodates ruin and in which ruin is both a condition and a proof of the
78
Brown, Irish Dylan Thomas, 467.
79
F.R. Higgins, Yeats as Irish Poet, in Stephen Gwynn, ed., Scattering Branches:
Tribute to the Memory of W.B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1940), 14555: 147.
80
81
(London: Macmillan, 1957), 4889.

voices power of endurance. This site, this projective Here, is a place the
poem makes, and which the stanza builds, and builds upon.82
Coole Park, 1929 offers a less comforting relationship between place,
poet, and posterity than MacNeice imagines for Thomas, despite the
attempt to make Thomass locale map on to Yeatss. The praise of
Thomass poetic craft in Autumn Sequel also brings Yeats into play:
He made his own sea-shells
In which to hear the voices of the sea,
And knew the oldest creatures, the owl that tells
How it has seen three forests, rise and fall,
And the great sh that plumbs the deepest wells
Of Cambrian prehistory [ . . . ].83
This image of Thomas making his own sea-shells alludes to Yeatss early
The Song of the Happy Shepherd (which MacNeice had earlier alluded
to in Train to Dublin, discussed in Chapter 1), in which the shepherd
advises his listener to:
Go gather by the humming sea
Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell,
And to its lips thy story tell,
And they thy comforters will be,
Rewording in melodious guile
Thy fretful words a little while,
Till they shall singing fade in ruth
And die a pearly brotherhood;
For words alone are certain good:
Sing, then, for this is also sooth.84
Yeatss gathered seashell offers echoes of the sea that will reword the poets
own words. Part of what this symbol represents is the distance between the
poet and nature, engaged with through the intermediary seashell. The
poem also dramatizes the complex interaction between the poet and form,
gured in terms of partial estrangement as a mingling of the self and the
echoes harbouring in a shell. Authority is displaced from the poet to form,
to the voices of the past and to words alone. In MacNeices description of
Thomas, this displaced authority and distance between the poet and
nature are overturned. An intricate web of interactions between the
poet, nature, the past, and form is collapsed into a more complete series
82
Peter McDonald, Yeatss Poetic Structures, in Serious Poetry: Form and Authority
from Yeats to Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 5169: 51.
83 84
MacNeice, Collected Poems, 453. Variorum Yeats, 647.

of identications: Thomas is the maker of his own forms, these sea-shells,
and has complete communication with nature, the voices of the sea. The
sentence also moves from Thomass seashells to him knowing the past,
the oldest creatures, rather than him experiencing an estranging inter-
action with the pasts echoes. Substituted for Yeatss complexities is a more
sentimental conception of the poets power.
MacNeices misreading of Yeats at this point in his career can be further
seen in the passage recollecting Higgins. Its rst two lines, I knew one
other poet who made his choice | To sing and die, a meticulous maker
too, echoes Yeatss The Choice: The intellect of man is forced to choose
| Perfection of the life, or of the work.85 Yeatss astringencies are again
softened in being transferred to another poet. Lyricism is portrayed as
having owed from Higgins, in consort with gossip, due to his character
and his connection to the west. Yeatss troubling sense of art as a sacrice
of the life lived becomes a collapse of the life into the work, of poetry as an
extension of poetic personality, with the sacrice for that colourful life and
poetry then resulting in an early death. It also passes over the questioning
in Yeatss poem of the value of the art that has been created: When all that
storys nished, whats the news?86 Through formal accomplishment and
a connection to nature, landscape, and the past, Thomas and Higgins are
depicted as ascending to a vantage point from where they can outface
times destructive force.
This builds on the privileged position claimed for the poet and for
poetic form in Thomass poetry during its more programmatic
moments. Prologue, which Thomas wrote to preface his 1952 Collected
Poems, explicitly foregrounds a connection between the poet, form,
and place, allegorizing poetic craft (my bellowing ark) and emplaced
song (I trumpet the place) as offering a refuge from impending de-
struction (the ood).87 Form is seen as a good in and of itself, a reied,
homely retreat from reality rather than a means to respond to its
challenges. Cronin noted at the time that for all Thomass great tech-
nical range and skill, his technique never has to struggle very hard with
the meaning, there is no counter-discipline of thought or purpose to
distract him or to present any obstacle to his loquacity.88 This observa-
tion resembles several critics later comments on Autumn Sequel. Alan
Gillis condemns its humdrum terza rima as a zombication of the lithe,
85
MacNeice, Collected Poems, 455; Variorum Yeats, 495.
86
87
Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems (London: Dent, 1952), xvxviii.
88
In the same piece he also noted MacNeices recent descent into pictorial journalism
and hearty and sentimental common-manship. Anthony Cronin, Poetry in Britain
Today, The Bell 18.11 (Summer 1953), 58999: 5934.

coiled, tensile, swooping, elastic and loaded line of Autumn Journal .89
MacNeices guration of form in the long poem in terms of place, identity,
and refuge, as opposed to a Yeatsian admittance of estrangement and
ruination, also draws him close to a regionalist sense of poetic craft, such
as is bluntly allegorized in Hewitts contemporaneous Homestead: It is
time now for me to build a house | to be a shelter in rough days.90 Autumn
Sequel invests in character, form, and place as a bulwark against present
pressures and future destruction. As the misreading of Yeats revealed
through these allusions suggests, this is wishful thinking at a low ebb in
his career rather than a clear-headed appraisal of the poetic choices at hand.
Looking beyond the characterizing tendencies of Rodgers and Mac-
Neice, had The Character of Ireland been published it would have been
only one of a wave of books of the period with similar aspirations to
capture the character of Ireland and its people, several of which MacNeice
reviewed.91 These included OFaolins The Story of Ireland (1943) and
The Irish (1947), Arland Usshers The Face and Mind of Ireland (1948),
Olivia Mannings The Dreaming Shore (1950), Geoffrey Taylors The
Emerald Isle (1952), Honor Tracys Mind You, Ive Said Nothing!
(1953), Frank OConnors A Book of Ireland (1959), Kate OBriens My
Ireland (1962), and Brendan Behans Brendan Behans Island (1962).
Many of these works attempted to recuperate the real Ireland from the
myth-bound miasmas of cultural nationalism through the anatomization
of character (in ways that parallel attempts by Rodgers and MacNeice to
speak truth to power through the description of Northern Irish character).
OFaolin in The Irish writes a creative history of the growth of a racial
mind, pushing his historical observations towards a grand narrative of
enduring Irish character.92 In doing so, he is furthering an idea to be found
89
Alan Gillis, Any Dark Saying: Louis MacNeice in the Nineteen Fifties, Irish
University Review 42.1 (2012), 10523: 108. Also see Edna Longley, Louis MacNeice:
A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 11517.
90
The Collected Poems of John Hewitt, ed. Frank Ormsby (Belfast: Blackstaff Press,
1991), 6872: 68; orig. publ. in The Bell 18.1 (April 1952), 812.
91
See MacNeice, About Ireland (review of Maurice Craig, Dublin, Charles McDuff,
Ireland and the Irish, Geoffrey Taylor, The Emerald Isle, Denis OD. Hanna, The Face of
Ulster, and Richard Hayward, Connacht: Galway), The New Statesman and Nation 43.1106
(17 May 1952); The Other Island (review of Honor Tracy, Mind You, Ive Said Nothing!,
and Chiang Yee, The Silent Traveller in Dublin), The New Statesman and Nation 46.1187
(7 November 1953); Cest la terre (review of Angus MacLellan, The Furrow Behind Me,
Michael MacGowan, The Hard Road to Klondike, and Kate OBrien, My Ireland), The New
Statesman 63.1632 (22 June 1962); and The Two Faces of Ireland (review of Brendan
Behan, Brendan Behans Island, and Brian Inglis, West Briton), The Observer 8935 (30
September 1962); all repr. in Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, 1715, 18993, 2435,
2536.
92
Sen OFaolin, The Irish (West Drayton: Penguin, 1947), 5.

in his biographical works since the 1930s. For OFaolin, in describing a
gure such as Daniel OConnell as a type of the Irish mind, revisionary
senses of Irish identity can be discovered through the factual recovery of the
role played by historical gures in reecting and shaping the peoples will.93
This offered, as Brown notes, a powerful critique of prevailing ideology and
of the version of history that sustained it, such as the Revivals antiquarian
and transcendental heroic mix, or the stress placed on a continuous Gaelic
culture in the writings of Daniel Corkery.94 Yet such an emphasis on
embodying Irish character still operates through an attempt to display Irish-
ness, even if that identity is then seen to evolve and change subject to material
conditions and historical actors.
In Strange Country, Seamus Deane identies Synges The Playboy of the
Western World (1907) as exemplary of a moment in Irish cultural history
when a restrictive notion of an Irish national character, constituted in
social and political terms, gives way to a more liberating concept of
national identity, dened aesthetically, as blarney has become elo-
quence; history, legend.95 By the 1940s and 1950s, the empowerment
that this shift might once have offered had dissipated. Irishness had again
became a source of entrapment rather than liberation, receding in Deanes
terms from national identity back to national character, with any coherent
aesthetic agenda fallen by the way. Deane elsewhere identies the mid-
century as marked in Irish letters by a culture of failure: Talent, time,
money could be wasted, drunkenness and unemployment could be given
moral status and, nally, the writing itself would become imbued with
something of this spirit of subversive squalor.96 Shifting the emphasis
from the writers own culpability to more general problems in Ireland
during the period, John Goodby points to the near-impossibility of
individuals transcending a national malaise, a term also used by J.J. Lee
to label the period 19451958.97 The dolefulness of mid-century Irish
society can be too easily drawn into a forward-looking narrative of cultural
progress (as discussed in the Introduction).98 Many writers at the time,
93
Sen OFaolin, King of the Beggars: A Life of Daniel OConnell (1938; Dublin:
Allen Figgis, 1970), 68.
94
Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 19222002 (rev. edn, London:
Harper Perennial, 2004), 145.
95
Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since
1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 143.
96
Seamus Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (London: Hutchinson, 1986), 228.
97
John Goodby, Irish Poetry since 1950: From Stillness into History (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2000), 63; J.J. Lee, Ireland 19121985: Politics and Society
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 271328.
98
Mid-century Irish cultural vitality is highlighted in Brian Fallon, An Age of Innocence:
Irish Culture 19301960 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1998).

though, did have a highly antagonistic relationship with the society that
surrounded them. As Cronin, a particularly disillusioned participant in the
contemporary scene, noted, Ireland through its censorship, philistinism,
pietism, false and harmful standards of criticism provoked the writer into
angry and time-wasting assaults on things which in other countries a
creative artist would ignore while getting on with his job.99 In gesturing
against prevailing cultural and societal values, writers were drawn into the
roles of critic and victim of current circumstances through the bind of
somehow being oppositional and integral guresthe characteryet also
emblematic of the real, now suppressed, national character. Reecting on
the damaging legacy of the Poet as Hero in relation to the reduction of
Kavanagh, Brian ONolan, and Brendan Behan to actual illness, alcohol-
ism, irrelevant squabbles, vendettas, and premature graves, Dawe asks:
Mighty Characters: how often has that phrase been used patronizingly
of Irish writers?100
Kavanagh, for a period in the late 1940s and early 1950s, embodied this
self-contradictory condition of characterhood, operating as both a holy
fool and holy show.101 He rails vehemently against the notion of Irish
character while performing the role. He also both rejects and embraces the
pose of the bohemian character. Noting similarities between Thomas,
Higgins, and Rodgers, Brown is led to speculate as to Kavanaghs possible
attitude towards a seeming Welsh bucklep, seeing Thomas as analogous
to Behan whom Kavanagh loathed, as a broth-of-a-boy, cadger, show-
man, backer of horses and drunk.102 Yet so many of these terms apply to
Kavanagh too, who was certainly not above surviving when in England by
playing the part of the untamed savage genius for Londoners or the
London Irish, earning his keep by putting on a performance of other-
ness.103 The poets satirical verse and journalism of the time offer an
excoriating assault on the failings of Irish culture. However, as Hubert
Butler noted at the time, Kavanaghs notoriously critical Envoy diary
columns were themselves an exaggerated performance of character, a
shrieking and rattling display while the philistines looked on and
laughed.104 What was at stake for Kavanagh in relation to character in
99
Anthony Cronin, The Literary Pages of the Daily Press, The Bell 17.4 (July 1951),
511: 5.
100
Gerald Dawe, Hows the Poetry Going? , in The Proper Word, 329: 34.
101
Goodby, Irish Poetry since 1950, 33.
102
Brown, Irish Dylan Thomas, 456.
103
2001), 318.
104
Hubert Butler, Envoy and Mr. Kavanagh, The Bell 17.6 (September 1951), 3241:
34, 36.

these columns, and in the short ill-fated run of Kavanaghs Weekly that
followed in 1952, is stated in a 1950 entry: It is the exceptional man in
every country who gives the illusion of a national characteristic. The
exceptional man (or woman) steps vividly into the foreground of ones
vision and gives his character to the dim background crowd.105
The impossible pressures of this formulation at that cultural moment
resulted in his recurrent descent into being a clownish character exhibited
for a sneering town, as his increasingly self-reexive poetry came to
recognize.106
Kavanaghs inconsistencies are not only sufciently numerous and
blatant to suggest a strategic rejection of coherent thought on the subject
of national literature.107 They suggest a strategic rejection of coherent
thought on the position of the poet within modernity too. Yet ONolan,
writing as Myles na gCopaleen in a mock counter-diary in Envoy, percep-
tively likened Kavanaghs stance to that of Baudelaire.108 Indeed, this was
a period in which poets on both sides of the Irish Sea were striking
Baudelairean poses. Intimately acquainted with bohemian literary circles
operating in Dublin and London, Cronin offers a bracing contemporary
assessment of the problems at hand and the responses provoked:
As a part of the organism of society poetry no longer exists [ . . . ] the only real
audience for contemporary verse are the bohemian pub dilletanti who but for
a failure of talent or earnestness would be producers rather than consumers.
[ . . . ] When the poet loses his audience he sometimes, as in the nineties,
loses the seriousness of his vocation, and becomes a drunken romantic,
confusing his natural dislike of society and his inability to conform to its
more obviously stupid pretences with the pathetic degeneracy of the artist
manqu who has no claim of an audience at the best of times.109
Cronins poetry of the period dramatizes such responses in more ambiva-
lent terms. Baudelaire in Brussels describes the French poet as the
archetype, in tracing his nal descent into mute madness: No mind
can hold too many truths at once. Such an archetype then seems to
stand behind the portrait of a Kavanagh-like contemporary in Anarchist,
out of step with the prerogatives of the city around him, who comes to life
in the pub: seated again at the marble-topped table | The dream ickers
105
Patrick Kavanagh, Diary, Envoy 4.13 (December 1950), 8590: 86.
106
Patrick Kavanagh, Testament, Envoy 3.10 (September 1950), 856.
107
Kit Fryatt, Patrick Kavanaghs Potentialities , in Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis,
eds, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),
18195: 186.
108
Myles na gCopaleen [Brian ONolan], Baudelaire and Kavanagh, Envoy 3.12
(November 1950), 789.
109
Cronin, Poetry in Britain Today, 58990.

round him, he lives as he talks.110 MacNeices own emotional and artistic
investment in bucklepping gures such as Thomas, Higgins, and Rodgers,
and the emphasis he placed on their character as the source of their value
as poets, might be viewed as a similar kind of attempted anarchistic gesture
or search for integrity through opposition to prevailing societal values. The
poetry of character and the poet as character form an important part
of responses to poetrys mid-century marginalization, escapist and self-
damaging though they might prove to have been. A further irony of course
is that MacNeice was seemingly at some remove from genuine marginal-
ization at this point (in stark contrast to Kavanagh say), in being paid to
have his long poems broadcast on the BBC. Nevertheless, his investment
in character points to the manner in which his work related to contem-
porary movements within Irish literature, as well as the ways in which Irish
and British culture were intersecting and overlapping at this time. If
MacNeice generally resisted the temptation to identify wholly with his
Irish roots, he became somewhat more entangled in the pressure to explore
Irish character (even when actually Welsh) or to praise the integral and
oppositional voice of the character.
110
Anthony Cronin, Poems (London: Cresset Press, 1957), 19, 24.
5
A Little Solemnity
In 1959 Conor Cruise OBrien reviewed The Oxford Book of Irish Verse
(1958), edited by Donagh MacDonagh and Lennox Robinson. The
anthology was notable for its inclusive sense of Irish poetry. Objecting
to the presence of work by Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan,
Emily Bront, Oscar Wilde, C. Day Lewis, and Louis MacNeice, Cruise
OBrien asserts that not only their language but their culture is English.
A function of such an anthology should apparently be to pick out Irish
accents. Recognizing, however, that the notion of a national voice offers
up certain sirens, such as ideas of national rhythm or the descent into the
ancient blood, he proposes a denition of Irishness based not on blood,
birth, or language, but on the condition of being involved in the Irish
situation, historically rather than geographically. Incoherence soon fol-
lows, as his criterion unravels before the review even nishes: MacNeice is
welcomed back as a borderline case who might as well be annexed, while
the inclusion of Robert Gravess Love Without Hope is applauded due to
its Irish note, rather than the poets involvement with the Irish situ-
ation.1 In 1963 Cruise OBrien reviewed Vivian Merciers literary history
The Irish Comic Tradition. Questioning the notion of some kind of pan-
historical Irish mind, he writes:
The idea that there is an Irish mind, continuing with its own peculiar
quirks, not shared even by other Europeans, from medieval times to the days
of Samuel Beckett, seems to me implausible. Dr. Mercier, although not
consistently a victim of this idea, gives it rather more credit than it deserves.2
It is not so much that Cruise OBriens ideas in these two reviews directly
conict with one another. In logical terms they do not. Rather they are
emblematic of a struggle both towards and away from essential or at least
1
Conor Cruise OBrien, Irishness (review of Donagh MacDonagh and Lennox
Robinson, eds, The Oxford Book of Irish Verse), The New Statesman (January 1959), repr.
in Writers and Politics (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), 87100.
2
Conor Cruise OBrien, Our Wits About Us (review of Vivian Mercier, The Irish
Comic Tradition), The New Statesman (February 1963), repr. in Writers and Politics, 1015.

categorically denable notions of Irish literary identity within the wider
critical discourse of the time, a struggle to which even an intellectual as
attuned to the pitfalls of cultural nationalism as Cruise OBrien could
become, to use his own terms, a victim.
The 1950s had been marked by growing unease about the restrictions
imposed by the prevailing pressure placed on Irish culture to display its
identity. In 1951, The Bell (whose deputy editor at the time was Anthony
Cronin, himself an agitating commentator on the contemporary scene, as
discussed in Chapter 4) published a symposium on The Young Writer.
Valentin Iremongers contribution bemoans the prevailing emphasis among
older Irish writers on either sociological modes or the notion of a distinct
Irish tradition but which, in fact, is nothing more than a mode which was
evolved and popular during the period for the end of the nineteenth century to
about 1930, the fraying ends of which are still limply ying. Neither group seem
to be interested in the young writer as writer only, endeavouring to formulate
and answer the fundamental questions that present themselves to all humanity.3
John Montague similarly identies the periodicals damaging focus on work
of social emphasis, which has led writing away from its real purpose at the
present time, the imaginative and honest expression of the writers own
problems, not those of his sickening community. He considers the general
malaise in Irish writing to be the aftermath of a conscious attempt to create
a specically Irish literaturethe tradition of the Revival exhausted, we nd
ourselves cut off from contemporary European literature, with little or no
audience in England, since our national preoccupations have left us miles
behind in the race.4 Both poets seek to reorientate Irish writing away from
the representation of Ireland or the performance of a national style.
Whether talking of the writers own problems or universal fundamental
questions, they advocate writing that is more literary, international, and
existential in focusin the more general sense of being concerned with the
experience of existence. These are pervasive, though often vaguely dened,
calls during the period.
David Gardiner sees Montague in his early career as engaged in critic-
ally clearing the way for a new artistic programme.5 Surveying the
3
Valentin Iremonger, contribution to The Young Writer Symposium, The Bell 17.7
(October 1951), 1218: 14.
4
John Montague, contribution to The Young Writer Symposium, The Bell 17.7
(October 1951), repr. as The Young Irish Writer and The Bell in The Figure in the Cave
and Other Essays, ed. Antoinette Quinn (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1989), 16773: 16870.
5
David Gardiner, Unsentimental Prophecy: John Montague and The Dolmen Miscel-
lany (1962), in Thomas Dillon Redshaw, Well Dreams: Essays on John Montague (Omaha:
Creighton University Press, 2004), 6380: 67.
A Little Solemnity 137

contemporary scene for North American readers in Chicagos Poetry in
1959, he saw Irish verse since Yeatss as characterized by isolation, being
increasingly limited and local in subject matter, and historically irrele-
vant in a world of war, with the better poets seeming almost to court
obscurity by seldom publishing in volume form.6 Regionalism, or Por-
trait of the Artist as a Model Farmer, from Poisoned Lands and Other Poems
(1961), satirizes such agendas.7 It makes reference to regionalisms presence
on the radio, where Wild provincials | Muttering into microphones |
Declare that art | Springs only from the native parta description that
might apply as much to Austin Clarkes prescriptions on Radio ireann as
to the BBCs output. The poet-cum-farmer speaker in the poem shields his
crop from Foreign beetles and exotic weeds, and in doing so his reward is
erce anonymity. Montagues call for the need for internationalism in
Irish poetry, for an opening up to European and North American inu-
ences, has often been noted; to thrive, the poem implies, Irish poetry will
also have to speak to other audiences.8
Similar views were articulated by Thomas Kinsella. Commenting on his
own collection Another September (1958) for the Poetry Book Society
Bulletin, he contrasts his poems lack of public concern with their focus
on the dignity of the isolated person and their bargainings with time.
[S]ocial and political matters are rejected in favour of a turn to individual
consciousness. He thinks this might account for the poems not being
especially Irish, which leads to the following speculation:
I am not sure than an Anglo-Irish poetry survives, apart from Yeats and his
personal reign over two generations. Good poetry by Irishmen is quickly absorbed
into the English system and is only vaguely differentiated there. Much of what is
called Anglo-Irish is either a sophisticated imitation of Gaelic modes or else
regional verse: these are the retreats most favoured by those who cannot otherwise
resist, or keep their balance in, the gravitic force of English writing.9
A broader literary eld, the English system, is placed against the idea of
a distinct Irish poetry, whether achieved through the Irish mode or
6
John Montague, Isolation and Cunning: Recent Irish Verse, Poetry 94.4 (July 1959),
26470: 270.
7
John Montague, Poisoned Lands and Other Poems (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1961), 56.
8
John Goodby, Irish Poetry Since 1950: From Stillness into History (Manchester: Man-
chester University Press, 2000), 87.
9
Thomas Kinsella, Another September: Thomas Kinsella Writes . . ., Poetry Book Society
Bulletin 17 (March 1958), repr. in Thomas Kinsella, Prose Occasions: 19512006, ed. Andrew
Fitzsimons (Manchester: Carcanet, 2009), 56. The volume was the societys choice for that
quarter. A copy was sent to all members, boosting sales by about 600700 copies. Dillon
Johnston, Like Snow Off a Rope: Montagues Publishers and his British Readership in the
Sixties, in Redshaw, ed., Essays on John Montague, 4662: 56.

regionalism. As John McAuliffe notes, Kinsellas early work enacts its
disengagement from the prevailing modes of Irish poetry through the
adoption of Audens formal nish and Eliots authoritatively weary
tone.10 His use of the word retreat above, though, resembles something
of MacNeices earlier charge of escapism at the start of the war in relation
to the notion of an Irish mode and the critical pronouncements of
F.R. Higgins and others (as discussed in Chapter 2). The dialectic has
since shifted, and a post-war retreat for Kinsella involves a neglect of the
personal for the public. By the late 1950s a younger generation of poets
were, though on different terms, coming to recognize that writing an Irish
poetry in English could not justify turning away from the dilemmas of
modernity or transnational cultural currents.
Both Montague and Kinsellas early work was published by Liam
Millers Dolmen Press, an energizing force that Kinsella described as
playing a major part in the attempt to restock a country lean in poetry
after recent greatness.11 They served as editor and poetry editor respect-
ively for the only issue of The Dolmen Miscellany of Irish Writing (1962),
for Gardiner a dening moment when Irish writing self-consciously
emerged from Emergency isolation.12 The miscellany included poetry,
ction, and criticism by Aidan Higgins, Brian Moore, Pearse Hutchinson,
James Liddy, Richard Weber, John Jordan, Richard Murphy, Valentin
Iremonger, John McGahern, and James Plunkett. Montagues editorial
heralds a new generation of Irish writers who differ from their predecessors
in being more literary and more experimental. They also share the
desire to avoid the forms of Irishism (whether leprechaun or garrulous
rebel) which have been so protably exploited in the past. In such a
context, a little solemnity may be a revolutionary gesture.13 By 1962
this was a familiar space-clearing move. However, Montagues stress on
formal experimentation indicates that by literary he more particularly
poses Continental or European idealsbroadly put, the legacies of
modernismas opposed to the folk ideals of the Literary Revival.14
Outward-looking, formally and tonally serious and adventurous writing
is offered as the antidote to the performance of national identity, diag-
nosed in similar terms, leprechaun or garrulous rebel, to the writing of
10
John McAuliffe, Disturbing Irish Poetry: Kinsella and Clarke, 19511962, in Fran
Brearton and Alan Gillis, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), 22539: 2278.
11
Kinsella, Another September: Thomas Kinsella Writes . . ., 6.
12
Gardiner, John Montague and The Dolmen Miscellany (1962), 63.
13
Prefatory Note in John Montague and Thomas Kinsella (poetry), eds, The Dolmen
Miscellany of Irish Writing (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1962).
14
Gardiner, John Montague and The Dolmen Miscellany (1962), 66.

character discussed in Chapter 4. Indeed, Montagues double-edged
diction turns on a critique of Irish writers mid-century entanglements
with the Janus-faced roles of stage Irishman (protably exploited) and
political curer (revolutionary).
MacNeice was aware of this younger generation of Irish poets. He was
one of the judges who awarded Kinsella a Guinness Poetry Award in 1958
for Thinking of Mr. D.15 Montague also recalled, in an interview with
Jon Stallworthy, that MacNeice visited the University of Iowas Writers
Workshop in 1954, while Montague was a student there, and picked out
his Irish Street Scene, with Lovers for praiseseveral other meetings also
included the older poets attendance of the London launch for Poisoned
Lands and Other Poems.16 MacNeices work from the late 1950s mirrors
these poets unease with displays and characterizations of Irish identity.
This is most surprisingly evident in his prologue to The Character of
Ireland, completed in July 1959, seven years after he had undertaken to
write it (and only published posthumously). It suggests that MacNeices
sympathy with the project had wavered by the decades end, when, as
McDonald notes, he found his own poetic resources renewing themselves.17
The poem opens with a recurrent trope of nationalist history, Irelands
lack of a Roman invasion: The Romans looked the other way, the roads |
Remained boreens and never ran on time. This echoes, for example,
Douglas Hydes address on The Necessity of De-Anglicising Ireland
(1892): we alone developed ourselves naturally upon our own lines
outside of and free from all Roman inuence.18 This placement of the
poem in a non-Roman Ireland stands at the beginning of a thirty-line
opening sentence that offers a paratactic torrent of similes and seemingly
symbolic details, parodying those who have sought to encapsulate Ireland
through such rhetorical means. The idea that tangled | Woods are like
dark intrigues, that ragged walls are Gapped like a faulty argument, and
that explosions | Of rooks are like jokes in crowded bars renders absurd
the identications on which the writing of national character often relies:
levelling the differences between animals, landscape, history, and political,
social, or psychological phenomena amounts to a satirically resonant
15
[Unnamed], The Guinness Book of Poetry 1957/58 (London: Putnam, 1959), 16.
16
Jon Stallworthy, interview with John Montague, Bodleian Library, Stallworthy
Papers, Box 30M; John Montague, Despair and Delight, in Terence Brown and Alec
Reid, eds, Time was Away: The World of Louis MacNeice (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1974),
1237.
17
MacNeice, Collected Poems, 77982; Peter McDonald, Mistaken Identities: Poetry and
Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 38.
18
Douglas Hyde, The Necessity of De-Anglicising Ireland (1892), repr. in Seamus
Deane, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 3 vols (Derry: Field Day, 1991), II,
52735: 529.

nonsense. With the piling on of gerunds and antimonies, the sentence
ends in a vain attempt at denition:
With all this aring and fading, soaring and sinking,
Roaring and dreaming, caterwauling and song,
Day and decay, night and delight, joy and alloy,
Pros and cons, glitter and lth, this island
Hitched to the sun that sets in the Atlantic
Lumbers into her misty west.
This inhabits something of the bombastic tone of Standish OGradys
evocation of The Heroic Period in his History of Ireland (1878): Clear,
noble shapes of kings and queens, chieftains, brehons, and bards gleam in
the large rich light shed abroad over the triumphant progress of the
legendary tale.19 It is also a piece of personal revisionism, echoing Mac-
Neices investment in the misty west in Autumn Sequel and elsewhere,
and mocking the manner of his past attempts at cultural characterization,
such as, in relation to Ireland, with Valediction or Western Landscape.20
Moving chronologically forward, the poem repeats further nationalist
historical tropes. It notes the vain efforts of Normans and Tudors to co-
opt the natives, again echoing Hyde, who had outlined the failure of
invaders to disrupt the continuity of the social life of this island.21 On
arrival at the present, the tone shifts from parody to indignation. Regard-
less of supposed historical continuities and its appearance as a dreamland
to the tourist (glancing towards the post-Emergency upsurge in Irish
tourism and also surely to MacNeices own romanticizing jaunts) to its
current sons and even more her daughters, the country is a dream from
which they yearn to wake; the liner | Outhoots the owls of the past.22
Against nationalist historiography is pitted the massive labour emigration
of the 1950s, in which more women left Ireland than men.23 In the face
of such pressures, as McDonald describes, the founding assumptions of
the book project are brought into question, as the poem turns into a series
of questions: The Character of Ireland? Character? | A stage conven-
tion? A historical trap? | A geographical freak?24 Musing on the 1916
uprising, the poem asks whether the nation was merely the product of a
19
Standish OGrady, History of Ireland, I: The Heroic Period (London: Sampson, Low,
Searle, Marston and Rivington, 1878), 21.
20
2007), 461.
21
Hyde, The Necessity of De-Anglicising Ireland, 529.
22
23
Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland: 19002000 (London: Prole
Books, 2005), 4702.
24

gesture, the imposition of unsolicited poetry by the death of sixteen
men, which soon relapsed to prose. In the face of overreaching poetical
effects, the speaker adopts the disempowered, displaced, transitory, and
querulous position of asking questions. This explicit disavowal of author-
ity offers a renunciation of the bardic unifying cultural nationalistic modes
parodied in the poems opening (and to some extent assented to by the
edited collections very title).25 In MacNeices work by this point, as
McDonald notes, paradox is regarded as a strength and division as a
resource.26
The second half of the prologue builds upon this disempowered stand-
point. The idea of a nation is replaced with the description of something
unxed and unxable: a land of words and water that keeps owing, a
ripple to be glimpsed between the presents lines | Of prose.27 In
contrast to the failed similes of characterization employed earlier in the
poem, moving water and lights shifting prismatic colours are open
symbols of a tangible yet mutable interow of feeling between the
individual and the nation. Beyond the facts, love for Ireland is acknow-
ledged and still offers the aspiration of taking this accident of time and
place | And somehow, even now making it happy. This feeling though is
compared to a love so assured because it seems so casual. The poem has
travelled from an attempt to conjure identity rhetorically towards a
relationship with a shifting space that through acceptance can afford to
forego articulation. A utopian sensibility, the possibility of a different
Ireland, is rediscovered in spite of the doleful social and political
presentthe siren voices of the liners and the standing scum in com-
mittee room and ofcethrough a lack of displays of affection.
Such control resembles a range of positions of qualied affection that
Irish poets came to adopt in the 1950s in avoiding overt Irishism.28
Restraint underpins Montagues Irish Street Scene, with Lovers, the
poem which MacNeice had picked out for praise.29 Painterly, as its title
suggests (Honor OConnor compares it to a Renoir painting), its opening
stanzas evoke a quiet evening with reserve.30 The observing self does not
intrude. Suggestive descriptions, such as of a robins guttering cry as it
briey rests on a tree before leaving on some furtive errand of its own, or
25
26
1991), 217.
27
McDonald, Mistaken Identites, 38; MacNeice, Collected Poems, 781.
28
Prefatory Note in Montague and Kinsella, eds, The Dolmen Miscellany.
29
John Montague, Forms of Exile (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1958), 2.
30
Honor OConnor, Forms of Exile: Poems and Satires, 19461958 in Redshaw, ed.,
Essays on John Montague, 2945: 41.

of the evening sky washed and grey, remain merely suggestive. The
carefully outlined scene is then made secondary to the pair of lovers in
the nal lines:
The world, with a most suitable tact, shrinks
To the soaked worn section of cloth,
They silently parade beneath.
As the umbrella becomes the periphery of their cosmosits assembly of
spokes like points of starsthe scene becomes a setting through which
they move, reversing the titles apologetic with. Beyond the title, the
scenes Irishness goes unremarked; hushed affection is merely implicit in
the care with which external textures are described; a community or
identity does not have to be enacted.
Stylistic and emotional reticence also informs the work of Richard
Murphy, another poet associated with Dolmen. His background was
similar to MacNeices: the son of a colonial administrator, with links to
the west, whose grandfather was a Church of Ireland minister, he attended
boarding school in England before going on to Oxford. He also under-
went something of a struggle to nd his poetic voice during the 1950s.
Having started to make his way in literary London, reviewing for The
Spectator and giving talks for the BBC, he won the AE Memorial Award in
1951 and left England to live in an isolated cottage in Connemara. He
tried to write a narrative poem there, with a modern story paralleling the
myth of Diarmuid and Grinne (he recollects it being titled Voyage to an
Island, but correspondence with MacNeice suggests it was at some point
also called The Deserters).31 He sent part of the poem to MacNeice in
1952, asking him to forward it to the Italian journal Botteghe Oscure:
I wonder if you would very kindly forward this rst part of my narrative
poem The Deserters to Botteghe Oscure, with the note of introduction which
perhaps you remember last March you said you would write. It would be
extremely helpful to me to have this section, which is about a third of the
whole poem, published at this stage. The present draft is different to the
version I sent you last winter. If you have time to read it, I should be most
interested to hear what you think.32
The poem was not a success: I poured into lines of blank verse the passion
I felt while typing but, when I went back and read them, they sounded
31
Richard Murphy, The Kick: A Life Among Writers (London: Granta, 2002), 1302.
32
Richard Murphy to Louis MacNeice, 2 September 1952, Bodleian Library, Mac-
Neice Papers, Box 18.

wilful and turgid.33 MacNeices reply reects this, suggesting it might be
better to send on some lyrics:
I must apologise for having been so dilatory over the poem which you sent
me in September, which I herewith return. I didnt send it on to the Princess
Caetani, a) because it looks as though I were not persona grata with her at the
moment seeing that she has failed to answer two if not three rather urgent
letters from me and b) I am sorry to say because this poem doesnt really get
me. I daresay I am quite wrong but I nd it in detail over-written and on the
intellectual and/or moral plane not as gripping as it is intended to be. I have
talked to Rodgers about this and we agree that it would be a better idea if you
sent the Princess a selection of your shorter poems.34
According to Murphys memoir, MacNeice also rejected the long-winded
epic for broadcast at the BBC in 1953: I remember him one day at a pub
near the BBC [. . .] He unnerved me by declaring, The west of Ireland is
nished.35
Much of Murphys rst pamphlet The Archaeology of Love, published by
Dolmen in 1955, reects the time he subsequently spent away from
Ireland in Crete and Paris. Yet the poem Auction belies MacNeices
dismissal of the west by uninchingly examining the particularities of
Murphys own situation. Recounting the selling of the contents of an
ancestral home, it nds an austere, analytical tone of acceptance in
describing the house, within the new political and social order, as now
a dead-free home. As Seamus Heaney notes of Murphys work more
generally, it resists Yeatsian bitterness or mystication in the face of Anglo-
Irish dispossession.36 The pasts loss and the speakers present isolation are
registered but not bewailed: Through lean, loved | Rooms alone I come.
A closing question also accepts some sense of a historical debt yet to be
paid: With what shall I buy | From times auctioneers | This old property |
Before it disappears?37 As Terence Brown writes of a question in Mur-
phys later long poem The Battle of Aughrim (1968), this is not a question
a dispossessed native would ask; nor is it one that a planted occupant
dare ask as he validates possession by work and improvement. But it is
the sort of question a poet perplexed about his contemporary social
33
Murphy, The Kick, 132.
34
Louis MacNeice to Richard Murphy, 25 November 1952, Letters of Louis MacNeice, ed.
35
Murphy, The Kick, 143.
36
Seamus Heaney, The Poetry of Richard Murphy, Irish University Review 7.1 (Spring
1977), 1830: 21.
37
Richard Murphy, The Archaeology of Love (Dublin: Dolmen Press, c. 1955), 11.

position can.38 A subsequent elegy to his grandmother, The Woman of
the House (rst broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in 1959),
balances recollections of joyful childhood holidays at her home near the
MayoGalway border with an acknowledgment of the poverty surround-
ing and supporting that house: She bandaged the wounds their poverty
caused | In the house their exploited labour built. The speaker refuses to
give way to sentimentality about the past or the future: he notes that time
can never relax like this again.39 The poem constructs a space, free from
judgement, in which to recollect what happened.
Murphys questioning standpoint resembles MacNeices admittance in
the prologue to being in the position of only asking questions.40 But if
MacNeices unease with the characterization of Irish identity, his turning
away from bardic posturing in search of more provisional modes, was
running in parallel to the poetry and pronouncements of younger Irish
poets, comparable developments were also occurring in the work of older
contemporaries. Gregory A. Schirmer argues that Montague might be
contrasted with Kavanagh in being less concerned with attacking the
Revivals romanticization of the Irish peasant than with undoing the
paralyzing obsession with Irishness in general exhibited not only by
many writers associated with the Revival, but also those, including Kava-
nagh, writing against it.41 This distinction is helpful as regards placing
Montague and other young writers in relation to Kavanaghs satirical and
critical tussles with the Revival and its legacies during the late 1940s and
early 1950s. Yet Schirmer fails to track developments in Kavanaghs
poetry, moving ahead of his splenetic pronouncements in prose. Auditors
In (1951), for instance, looks beyond a paralyzing obsession with Irish-
ness in working away from satire towards a celebration of the particularity
of experience: The placeless Heaven thats under all our noses.42 This
shift is more emphatically staged in Prelude (1955) in which satire is
explicitly rejected for the transformative power of compassions ecstasy.43
As with the younger generation, Kavanaghs playful self-analysis offers a
programmatic call for a turn away from public poetry towards a mode that
38
Terence Brown, Poets and Patrimony: Richard Murphy and James Simmons, in
Irelands Literature: Selected Essays (Mullingar: Lilliput Press, 1988), 189202: 194.
39
Richard Murphy, The Woman of the House: An Elegy (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1959),
45, 10.
40
41
Gregory A. Schirmer, A Richly Ambiguous Position: Re-viewing Poisoned Lands, A
Chosen Light, and Tides, in Redshaw, ed., Essays on John Montague, 8194: 84.
42
Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems, ed. Antoinette Quinn (London: Allen Lane,
2004), 17983.
43
Kavanagh, Collected Poems, 2079.

might also be described as experiential or existential (though for Kavanagh
in some way mystically underpinned by pantheism and prayer).
The word placeless signals that this new mode was to involve some
rethinking of Kavanaghs relationship to place. Like much of his work of
the early 1950sKerrs Arse, Ante-Natal Dream, On First Looking
into E.V. Rieus Homer, EpicAuditors In casts rural recollections [. . .]
as a right way of poetry.44 The city comes off worse than the country, as
uplifting memories of Kellys Big Bush and Connollys corner are con-
trasted with Dublin: the sour soil of a town where all roots canker (drawing
on familiar regionalist terms).45 As the failure of his critical-satirical project
became clear amid personal disasterthe collapse of Kavanaghs Weekly in
1952, his failed libel action against The Leader in 1954, and his extended
hospitalization in 1955Kavanaghs poetry came to achieve a different,
paradoxical kind of triumph in his post-1955 noo poems in part through a
more open sense of place.46 The Hospital (1956) is a poem about a specic
location, the hospital attended signalled by the mention of the Rialto Bridge.
Its urbanity represents a clear shift, yet it also eschews parochial imperatives
in not so much paying tribute to where the poet was as to the quality of his
experience there.47 A gravelled yard offers an inexhaustible adventure not
due to any cultural specicity; the point of the places and objects observed is
their very banality. Rather, they are transgured by loves mystery.48
No one could accuse Kavanagh of restraint. Yet his late 1950s poems
through their mixture of stylistic excess and casualness, their radical
heterogeneity, often make clear the gap between the wonder experienced
in relation to any place and its intrinsic qualities.49 In Lines Written on a
Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin a series of aggrandizing descriptions of
the canal, such as a lock Niagorously roaring, are undercut by the
modesty of the nal lines wish to be commemorated by just a canal-
bank seat for the passer-by, reminding the reader that this is just a canal.50
This is a voice that cannot keep the unifying performance of authority and
44
2001), 304.
45
Kavanagh, Collected Poems, 182.
46
John Goodby, The Later Poetry and its Critical Reception, in Stan Smith, ed.,
Patrick Kavanagh (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009), 12144: 130.
47
Patrick Kavanagh, Mao-Tse-Tung Unrolls His Mat, Kavanaghs Weekly (24 May
1952), repr. as Parochialism and Provincialism, in A Poets Country: Selected Prose, ed.
Antoinette Quinn (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2003), 237.
48
Kavanagh, Collected Poems, 217; also see John Goodby, In Blinking Blankness:
The Last Poems, in Stan Smith, ed., Patrick Kavanagh (Dublin: Irish Academic Press,
2009), 14562: 1478.
49
Goodby, The Later Poetry and its Critical Reception, 125.
50
Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems, 227.

identity up for long, as with the parodying of the bardic voice in Mac-
Neices prologue; water also functions here and in other Kavanagh lyrics of
the time as a symbol of a uid feeling between the individual and a locale,
guring a eeting, transcendent moment of affect rather than a unifying,
grounded identity.
Austin Clarkes work, following his poetical re-emergence in 1955, also
rethinks authority and identity through a shift in the deployment of his
poetic voice. Clarkes critical pronouncements on the work of other Irish
poets and the state of Irish poetry can be misleading in this regard.
Emphasizing the ongoing validity of the Revivals modes, particularly
the creation of a Gaelic-inuenced Irish poetics in English, his 1935
essay Irish Poetry To-Day suggested that a complete identication of
interests between people and poet was both a feasible and desirable aim.51
Little seemed to have changed by 1951, when his pamphlet Poetry in
Modern Ireland aligned similar arguments to a hostile attitude towards
contact between Irish poetry and Anglo-American modernism.52 Indeed
Clarkes opprobrium on his frequent Radio ireann broadcasts drew
return-re from Kavanagh and others in the pages of Envoy.53 To reverse
W.J. McCormacks memorable phrase, Clarke was not only a scapegoat
of modernism but also a scapegoater of modernism.54
But with the publication of Ancient Lights (1955), and Too Great a Vine
(1957), and The Horse Eaters (1961) soon after, the poets conservatism
began to assume a different character, paradoxically attracting notice from
poets and critics who identied themselves with the legacies of modern-
ism, such as Kinsella, Montague, Denis Donoghue, and Donald Davie
(then teaching at Trinity College Dublin).55 Clarkes new work was a
formal and stylistic continuation of his earlier neo-revivalism, being even
more ingrained and informed, syllable by syllable and half-line by half-
line, by patterns imported from a wide variety of Irish-language models.
However, his poetry now employed apparent archaism in relation to
material to which it had no obvious or natural connection: social and
political satire, pursued directly rather than as previously (with the
51
Austin Clarke, Irish Poetry To-Day, The Dublin Magazine 10.1 (JanuaryMarch
1935), repr. in Reviews and Essays of Austin Clarke, ed. Gregory A. Schirmer (Gerrards
Cross: Colin Smythe, 1995), 5662: 56, 589.
52
Austin Clarke, Poetry in Modern Ireland, illus. Louis Le Brocquy (Dublin: Published
for the Cultural Relations Committee of Ireland by Colm O Lochlainn, 1951).
53
Patrick Kavanagh, Diary, Envoy 2.7 (June 1950), 8391; Foreword, Envoy 3.9 (August
1950), 57.
54
W.J. McCormack, Austin Clarke: The Poet as Scapegoat of Modernism, in Patricia
Coughlan and Alex Davis, eds, Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s (Cork: Cork
55
McAuliffe, Disturbing Irish Poetry, 229.

exception of Martha Blake) through historical or mythological analogy,
and contemporary urban life.56 The discontents of mid-century Ireland
act in counterpoint to a style that has become the remnant of the earlier
revivalist dream of a very different republic.
This resembles a Yeatsian position of authoritative outrage in relation to
the public realm, similar to that pursued in Responsibilities (1914). The
formal irony of Clarkes work has parallels with Yeatss use of ballad-like
forms in poems such as To a Wealthy Man who promised a Second
Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if it were proved the People
wanted Pictures and September 1913. In evoking the ballad they pitch a
better national identitydrawing on the values of Romantic nationalism
and the Italian Renaissanceagainst contemporary mean mindedness:
Was it for this the wild geese spread | The grey wing upon every tide.57
Discrepancy between past and present, and ideal and actual, are high-
lighted. But the voices speaking of truth to power, indeed the illusion of
an embodied natural voice aligned to the weight of the ballad tradition as
the performance of national character, stands as a utopian, unifying
counterweight. This is a connection between form, voice, and identity
kept dialectically in play even as Yeats later wrote in more disturbingly
rebarbative terms from the margins of Irish public life, such as in Parnells
Funeral (1934).58
In contrast, Clarkes development of the Irish mode amounts to an
anti-authenticist poetic that refuses to give the impression of naturalised
utterance.59 It might be further seen as a breaking of song-like preten-
sions. Considering the repercussions of the Catholic Churchs ban on
contraceptives and advocacy of the rhythm method, Marriage from
Ancient Lights seems to proceed through utterance. A persistent circling
around iambic pentameter (And when they cannot help it, steal the
crumbs), an allusion to Hamlets third-act To be or not to be soliloquy
(Aye, theres the rub!), questions and exclamations, and even an initial
hint at a ballad-like alternate rhyme scheme (grace/chaste) gesture
towards orality. Set against this is the kind of aural suppression both
literally evoked and guratively concealed in rhyming, against the stress
(an Irish-derived deibidhe rhyme), whisper with kiss. The poem also
contains a host of other non-discursive and somewhat concealed assonan-
tal (sacrament/calculate/pale) or merely visual (school/moon)
56
Ibid.; Austin Clarke, Collected Poems, ed. R. Dardis Clarke, intr. Christopher Ricks
(Manchester: Carcanet, 2008), 1845.
57
(London: Macmillan, 1957), 28790.
58 59
Variorum Yeats, 5413. Goodby, Irish Poetry since 1950, 27.

relational effects. In a poem that tries to reckon with the damage caused
when mortals calculate | Their pleasures, poetrys own measures are
brought into tension with human impulse; a public diktats imposition
on private pleasure is explored by a public voice marked by private
constraints.60 More generally, what might have been a mark of identity,
a national voice, foregrounds its own artice in elusive poems that explore
the self-estrangements precipitated by alienation from the body politic,
overborne for Clarke both by the Church and a grubby utilitarianism and
materialism.
* * *
There are clear differences between the poetry and critical polemic
produced by Clarke, Kavanagh, Montague, Kinsella, Cronin, and Murphy
during the 1950s and early 1960s. However, they can be seen as
operating within what Lucy Collins has described as a common cultural
dynamic.61 As this chapter illustrates, based on overlapping critiques of
Irish culture and society, and advocating and practising differing
responses, these poets were involved in what McAuliffe has usefully
characterized (in discussing Clarke and Kinsella) as a disturbance of Irish
poetry.62 Or as Alan Gillis alternately describes of MacNeice, Kavanagh,
and Clarke: Whatever way one contextualizes it, the historical moment
necessitated the uneasy task of stylistic renegotiation.63 A whole set of
expectations and assumptions about what it was to be an Irish poet were
thrown into question. To return to some of the conceptual terminology
employed regarding the condition of Irish poetry in the 1930s in
Chapter 1, drawing on Maureen McLanes work, Irish poets in the
1950s were engaged in challenging the bardic and minstrelsy complexes
that had by mid-century become dominant.64 They were dismantling the
obligation to adhere to and create a national identity through the display
of a connection with place, the embodiment of national character, the
performance of a national style, or the fashioning of myths of historical
continuity. On a number of fronts, they were re-examining the Irish poets
relationship to place, history, and style.
MacNeices work forms a part of this disturbance. The adoption in the
prologue of a critical standpoint towards nationalist historiography is part
60
Clarke, Collected Poems, 196.
61
Lucy Collins, Editorial: Reading Irish Poetry Cultures, 19301970, Irish University
Review 42.1 (Spring 2012), 15: 1.
62
McAuliffe, Disturbing Irish Poetry.
63
University Review 42.1 (2012), 10523: 105.
64
Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 57.

of a more general shift in Irish poetry from history as mythopoesis to an
exploration of how poetry might demythologize historyan idea exten-
sively pursued by Murphy and Montague in their later sequences The
Battle of Aughrim (1968) and The Rough Field (1972). A similar focus
occurs in the radio play MacNeice eventually wrote about the Battle of
Clontarf, They Met on Good Friday (1959).65 Subtitled A Sceptical
Historical Romance, it retells the story of Brian Borus victory against
an invading Viking army at Clontarf on Good Friday 1014 ad. The play
complicates any assumptions about what this might have meant in terms
of a national story by focusing on historical detail. In a Radio Times
introduction, the poet points out that whether the word nation should
be used in the context of Ireland in this period is doubtful: The records
show that there were Irishmen ghting on the Norse side and Norsemen
on the Irish side, with regional jealousies still tending to outweigh
patriotism. And, contrary to tradition, this was not a straight ght between
Christian and pagan as most of the Vikings had recently become at least
nominally Christian. Dublin was a Norse fort and market. Consequently
there was mixed blood in protagonists on both sides. Despite the Irish
victory, neither the Norse nor the Irish cultures were fated to survive for
long, with the Norman invaders shortly to appear.66 The complications
of this moment are also explored in On the Four Masters from the
sequence Dark Age Glosses from Solstices (1961). The speaker rebukes
those who regard the Dark Ages as a golden age and at Glendalough | Or
Clonmacnois let imagination play (in part presumably a reference to
Austin Clarkes investment in the Celtic-Romanesque), on the grounds
that the ames that engulfed such ruins were not only kindled by invading
Norsemen but also by boorish kings who were the monks compatriots:
Which is eventell it not in the Gaelic League | True of the High
King Brian.67 The poem excavates and explicates the difculties of Irish
identity through destabilizing and complicating this touchstone of nation-
alist history.
MacNeices notion in the prologue of asking questions also had other
implications as regards the kinds of modes that he was pursuing in the late
1950s. In some poems he was not only exposing the distortions created by
trying to characterize Ireland or to make history into a national narrative,
but also searching for a way beyond the persistent chimeras of roots and
65
Louis MacNeice, They Met on Good Friday (1959), repr. in Selected Plays of Louis
MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser and Peter McDonald (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993),
261301.
66
Louis MacNeice, Authors Foreword: The Battle of Clontarf , Radio Times 145.1882
(4 December 1959), repr. in Selected Plays of Louis MacNeice, 2634.
67

character. His poetry and critical prose paralleled the efforts of other Irish
poets to move away from realist, sociological representation or the per-
formance of national style. Returning to the metaphysical and mystical
implications of his poetry of the mid-1940s, he placed an emphasis on the
notion (again vaguely dened) of there being more fundamental or
universal inward questions, prompted by the conscious experience of
existence. In 1960 MacNeice asserted that
poets through the ages have often concerned themselves, like certain modern
playwrights such as Beckett and like ordinary people in their inner moments,
with the old chronic unanswerables, such as Whyor even howare we
here?68
The notion of pursuing old chronic unanswerables was expanded on in
his 1963 Clark Lectures. Posthumously published as Varieties of Parable,
they pick out, among modern writers, Edwin Muir, Samuel Beckett,
Harold Pinter, William Golding, and Franz Kafka as parable-writers,
operating in an intermediate category between realism, symbolism, and
allegory, creating special worlds through double-level writing.69 More
particularly, MacNeice views modern playwrights as being lyrical in their
concern with the kinds of age-old unanswerable questions: Why am
I here? Who am I? What is the purpose of it all? that used to be the
prerogative of poets.70 Modern parable writing is described as being both
contemporary and universal in addressing the human situation today. This
twentieth-century turn away from realistic and objectivist literary modes is
historicized in relation to an undermining of the post-Enlightenment
optimistic assumptions made both about science and human society
operating in parallel to a breakdown of the traditional Christian terms of
response to such rationalism.71
Parable and double-level writing formed a considerable part of Mac-
Neices output from the Second World War onwards. His late lyric poetry
makes increasing use of a mode that McDonald describes as indetermin-
ate parable: an unnished idiom and one which is of itself unnish-
able.72 Gillis suggests that the emergence of this form of parable, as well as
MacNeices turning to the self as the ground of lyric poetry, is related to
the dispersal of culture as a continuous communal space in the mid-
twentieth century.73 Donegal Triptych from Visitations moves towards
68
Louis MacNeice, Being Simple (review of J.M. Cohen, Poetry of this Age: 1908 to
1958), The Spectator 204.6868 (12 February 1960), 2256.
69
Louis MacNeice, Varieties of Parable (1965; London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 3, 5.
70 71
Ibid., 14, 124. Ibid., 6, 103.
72
McDonald, Louis MacNeice, 171, 176.
73
Gillis, Louis MacNeice in the Nineteen Fifties, 112.

such indeterminate and unnishable modes as a means of reapproaching
the communal and Ireland on different termsand more specically the
west of Ireland (so now to some degree working in parallel to Murphys
work).74 In the sequences rst section, the speaker confronts images of
decay and dereliction: Broken bollard, rusted hawser, | Age-old reasons for
new rhyme. The Donegal landscape is not engaged with as an example of a
characteristically Irish landscape. It is just a happenstance location through
which the poet considers his relationship with his past:
Here for instance: lanes of fuchsias
Bleed such hills as, earlier mine,
Vanished later; later shine
More than ever, with my collusion.
MacNeice is revisiting the terrain explored in the 1940s in poems of Holes
in the Sky (1948), such as the Achill poems in which, as Edna Longley
notes, western landscapes function as a topography for metaphysical
enquiry.75 The emphasis of these metaphysical enquiries, though, has
changed in the intervening decade. Several of the poems in Holes in the Sky
examined MacNeices relationship with Ireland and the relationship
poetry might have more generally to Ireland. A degree of conceptual
pressure was brought to bear on the relationship with place that other
Irish writers, whether regionalist or nationalist, were persistently advocat-
ing. Contrastingly, Irish literary or cultural contexts are now not invoked
so directly. Rather, the poem considers the experience of returning in
more abstract terms, visualizing existence as a spiral. Time is shown to
effect an estrangement of place: Once arrived, the clocks disclose | That
each arrival means returning [. . .] But who has turned the screw? We are
further | Off. Or is it deeper in? [. . .] All our depth usurps our surface.
To return to some of the conceptual distinctions made by Andrew
Thacker in relation to literary modernism more generally, as discussed in
Chapter 1, MacNeice in this later poem renders Ireland as a mobile, open
space, rather than as a xed place.76 The poem does so, though, not by
evoking a notion of historical time, of the perspectives of economic and
technological change, as Train to Dublin does; instead it focuses singu-
larly on the individual subjects sense of becoming in relation to the self s
own cumulative experience of time. As Gillis notes in drawing a compari-
son between MacNeices 1930s and later work, MacNeice no longer
74
75
Edna Longley, Louis MacNeice: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber,
1988), 32.
76
Andrew Thacker, Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 13, 31.

submits a differentiated North and South to trenchant cultural analysis.77
There is a shift from an unmasking of the cultural construction of Ireland as
a place, through highlighting the perception of it as a space in epistemo-
logical terms, towards an ontological sense of all space, which happens at
points to include Ireland. The depiction of Ireland as made up of open
spaces to be experienced and travelled through by the self in time was being
pursued by other poets of the period. Disjunctions between particular
locations and the individuals consciousness, allied to explorations of the
disconnections between personal and public history, inform poems as
diverse as Murphys Sailing to an Island, Clarkes The Loss of Strength,
and Kinsellas A Country Walk.78 MacNeices critique, though, operates
on a more abstract, universalizing basis. His late work often explores, as
Goodby describes, the limits of subject positioning altogether, predicated
on the lack of any monadic sense of identity.79 The second section of the
triptych attempts to bypass the cultural baggage associated with the west by
depicting the point of the compass as a universal sign of death: carefree
omen | For our own selves whose life-size thought | Of death must spiral
westward. The symbolizing of death as the westerly horizon underpins a
series of salutes to aspects of the scene as a reection of our own selves that
stops short of complete identication between man and nature: But never
there when we draw the curtain. This is done in a mixture of commonplace
yet fantastical allegorizing terms that move the poem away from cultural
specicity: our brother the Ass, our sister Water, our uncle, the Knave of
Storms, our Bride in the Moon. The stress on the value-inducing horizon
of death is something of a return to the mysticism of life asserted in the
opening to MacNeices study of YeatsThe faith in the value of living is a
mystical faithbut also places the poem somewhat in its post-war exist-
ential moment.80
Donegal Triptych is also an attempt to nd an idiom in which to write
of this landscape and contemplate the experiences philosophical implica-
tions, without becoming embroiled in previous constructions of this
landscape. The strain after more general terms of cultural reference is
registered in a resort to clich (home to roost), to heavy-handed canonical
allusion (drown your logic fathoms deep from Ariels song in The
Tempest and, as noted by William T. McKinnon, late and soon from
Wordsworths sonnet The world is too much with us), and the use of
77
78
Richard Murphy, Sailing to an Island (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1955); Clarke, Col-
lected Poems, 21419; Thomas Kinsella, Downstream (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1962), 459.
79
Goodby, Irish Poetry Since 1950, 58.
80
Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), viii.

those Everyman and Bunyan-esque allegorical personications (with nods
to Shakespeare too, as noted below).81 The stylistic marks of his radio
work, the grappling after some kind of culturally empowered yet inclusive
voice, are still present; the sequence is a staging post on the way to the
more radical indeterminacies of his last two volumes. In the third section,
the speaker asserts an enjoyment of looking back on the glittering silent
spiral of experienced time, of the presence of the past in the present,
apprehended in a timeless moment where the nether blue meets the upper
blue. The effect of perceiving what McKinnon describes as a transcend-
ent ultimate is the kickstarting of a whole chorus of nature-as-music stock
poeticisms: trout stream chirp and gurgle, | Stiff reeds and soft leaves
whisper, sea-gulls cry.82 In play are the intertwining gurations of music,
nature, and poetry offered in many lyric poems. In the context of modern
Irish poetry this carries further resonance, though, in the role played by
music and song in relation to landscape, operating within some kind of
minstrelsy or bardic complex, as discussed earlier. MacNeice is not so
much (like Clarke) breaking with poetrys pretence to song as moving
towards the responsible terms on which it might be re-embraced.
This journey is enacted in part through a sequential formal drama. The
rst section of Donegal Triptych is stylistically condensed. It is seemingly
modelled on the trochaic tetrameter abba end-stopped quatrains of the
main section of Shakespeares The Phoenix and the Turtle, to which a
clear allusion is made, the phoenix ed (another general term of cultural
reference); MacNeices poem shares something of Shakespeares poems
allegorical abstraction, and meditation on identity and defunctive music
too.83 The language in MacNeices rst section also draws attention to
itself as an almost physical object.84 The voice and form subsequently
loosen, in a manner that resembles Yeatss dramatic varying of form in
sequences such as The Tower, Meditations in a Time of Civil War,
Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen, and Blood and the Moon.85 The
81
MacNeice (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 62; William Wordsworth, The
Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 270; MacNeice
touches on both Everyman and Bunyan in Varieties of Parable, 2650. On Bunyan and
MacNeice see Richard Danson Brown, Everymans Progresses: Louis MacNeices Dia-
logues with Bunyan, in W.R. Owens and Stuart Sim, eds, Reception, Appropriation,
Recollection: Bunyans Pilgrims Progress (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 14763.
82
McKinnon, Apollos Blended Dream, 61.
83
William Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford:
84
Terence Brown, Louis MacNeice: Sceptical Vision (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan,
1975), 172.
85
Variorum Yeats, 40933, 4802.

nal sections long lines seem to represent a shift from contrived towards
natural music, in a voice now approaching speech in its lack of inversion
and ellipses:
And on black wet roads a mouth-organ start once more with its Why Why?
Which is good to ask provided the question it sung, and provided

We never expect an answer.
This echoes Ezra Pounds breaking of the sequence of a metronome in the
nal molossus of In a Station of the Metro: Petals on a wet, black bow.86
There is also resemblance to Thomas MacDonaghs identication of the
Irish modes less rigid sense of stress in the long-lined quatrains of Yeatss
The Lake Isle of Innisfree: Not conforming in our way of verse to the
regular English stress rhythm we have not the same necessity as the English
poets to depart from the natural word order.87 Revivalist unities are
overwritten with Romantic-modernist alienation and self-reection, in
terms that look forward to MacNeices stress in Varieties of Parable on
successful lyric poetrys ability to ask quasi-cathartic age-old unanswerable
questions.88 Crucially in the context of Irish poetics, singing is here being
reapproached as a vehicle for ongoing thought rather than identication
with place. Moving on from the disenchanted parroting of Autumn Sequel,
but also returning to the wartime communal thinking of The Kingdom,
the nal lines suggest that in singing in solitude from this space, this
heathered and weathered perch, a more universal communion will be
found: With other solitary beings, with the whole race of men.89 Mac-
Neice probably drew this paradox from the Marxist critic Christopher
Caudwell, cited in Varieties of Parable as viewing poetry as the medium
through which man retires into his inner self, thereby to regain communion
with his fellows.90 If such an inward turn is necessary, as Gillis notes, to
reconceive the aesthetic connections between self and society, the sequence
clearly also performs this turn in implicit relation to (or even as a suppres-
sion of) previous literary appropriations of the western Irish landscape.91
In Visitations, Donegal Triptych is followed by A Hand of Snap-
shots.92 This is another sequence that uses landscape as a topography for
86
F.S. Flint, Imagisme, Poetry 1.6 (March 1913), 198200; Ezra Pound, Collected
Shorter Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 109.
87
Talbot Press, 1916), 73.
88
MacNeice, Varieties of Parable, 14.
89
90
MacNeice, Varieties of Parable, 28. Emphasis is MacNeices own.
91
Gillis, MacNeice in the Nineteen Fifties, 113.
92

metaphysical enquiry.93 The opening lines of the rst poem, The
Left-Behind, evoke Ireland, with the mention of stout and potato plots:
Peering into your stout you see a past of lazybeds | A liner moving west,
leaving the husk of home. Through a series of riddles the poem reveals
that the causes of the depression of this Irish Rip Van Winkle, Rip
MacWinkle, are poverty, the passing of youth and the prospect of
death, rather than his particular circumstances in the west. At the poems
close, the protagonist is called away | To what now is merely mine, and
soon will be no ones home. Isolation offers no comfort to the man who
has stayed, as time is brought to bear on place; to be at home is still to be
unsettled. Making clear the shifting viewpoints and touristic perspective
gestured towards in the sequences title, the second poem, The Back-
Again, explores the complementary unease of the holidaying returnee.
Struggling to capture past feelings and connections, a repeated something
that undermines present worldly success, the speaker sees in his farmer
brother an oaf with dignity possessed of stoic wisdom: the sense | That it
is a ne day if it rains only a little. As McDonald notes, displacement is
shown to be inevitable, and more radically troubling in its implications
than exile could ever be.94
The sequence then examines the conceptual basis of notions of home.
Cosmically troubling horizons emerge in The Gone-Tomorrow. Its
opening stanzas posit the developmental impact of an apparently western
environment, whins, turf , mud, and surf , on a two-year-olds smal-
lest of small skulls. Against this, rather brutally, is placed not only
individual displacement and death, the skull fated to lie in a box on a
foreign shore, but the annihilation of the world itself, when the skies |
Have lost their blue like those blue eyes. A larger historical vistawith
particular resonances in the nuclear agebelittles the signicance of
home, of having been formed by a particular location, altogether. The
Once-in-Passing examines a wished-for spiritual basis for identity with
place: here the cross on the window means myself . This connection is
revealed as being a matter of enjoying imagining (again as a tourist) the
permanence of what passes. Not having been born here is a barrier to
more concrete connection, but so is the lack of other forms of integration:
the gap between the life his dreams imagine and what he could earn here
is itself unimaginable. Returning somewhat to the terms of the critique of
MacNeices wished-for identication with the islanders in I Crossed the
Minch (1938), this emphasis on the working life plays on the persistent
regionalist metaphor of rootedness: For what takes root or grows that
93 94
Longley, Louis MacNeice, 32. McDonald, Louis MacNeice, 221.

owns no root? The gap between imagining a lifestyle and living it is
suggested in the implications of the word earn: spiritual development
might have to be earned, but the spiritually impeding economic hardships
of having to earn ones existence are to be reckoned with too. As the
closing poem The Here-and-Never describes, though, whatever the
integrity of the life that was here and now, living and dying, but never |
Lifelong dying or dead-alive, it can be never again. The ability of the
concept of home to offer consolation rests, the sequence suggests, on the
individual minds ability to breach the gap between the actual and the
imagined life, or to tolerate their contradictions.
Longley sees MacNeice in The Once-in-Passing as musing on an
alternative life he might have lived in the West of Ireland, and through
the imagination negotiating a tentative link between his autobiography
and the emblem of a corporate Christian Irish past, which gives the poet
a stake in the country and the country a stake in the poetry.95 McDonald
suggests that Ireland in the sequence becomes of exemplary importance
for MacNeice in being where the different uses of time, place, and
belonging can come into something of an antinomical relationship.96
But Irish contexts in the sequence, whether autobiographical, religious,
or literary, are also transposed into specically abstract terms. It is not so
much that the country has a stake in the poetry, rather that the poetry
makes Ireland into a site of enquiry into dilemmas that pertain to existence
more generally. Ireland is evoked as an impressionistic-symbolic land-
scape and a parable-site of origins, but alongside similarly unstable and
dreamlike treatments of other locations, such that Britain and Ireland
become steadily intermeshedas Gillis describes of the echoes of Dorset
and Carrickfergus in House on a Cliff , also from Visitations.97 That
Ireland is being treated as just another location rather than an exemplary
location also seems to be reinforced by the organization of the volume as a
whole, in which Donegal Triptych and A Hand of Snapshots are
followed by further poems of travel, taking in England, Uganda, Egypt,
Pakistan, and France.98 Robyn Marsack argues that MacNeices style in A
Hand of Snapshots, with its restricted vocabulary and neatness of
construction, may have been motivated by concern to make his experi-
ence less ostensibly autobiographical. She cites a draft for The Here-and-
Never section that is marked by frequent changes of pronouns to distance
memories.99 This style also intersects with the treatment of location. The
air of abstracted fable or parable, reinforced by the riddle-like content,
95 96
Longley, Louis MacNeice, 34. McDonald, Louis MacNeice, 222.
97
98 99
MacNeice, Collected Poems, 5047. Marsack, The Cave of Making, 1067.

moves the poems away from the embodied emplacement and cultural
specicity of much previous Irish lyricof song as identitytowards a
notion of song as a vehicle for cognition. The recasting of place as space,
and the interconnected reformulation of song, constitute manoeuvres in
relation to the eld of Irish poetry, among many similar disturbances
being performed during this transformative period.
6
MacNeices Byzantium
The last thing that Louis MacNeice wrote was a brief introduction to his
nal volume, The Burning Perch (1963), for the Poetry Book Society
Bulletin. Taken aback by the high proportion of sombre pieces, Mac-
Neice draws a comparison with W.B. Yeats: Fear and resentment seem
here to be serving me in the same way as Yeats in his old age was served by
lust and rage, and yet I had been equally fearful and resentful of the
world we live in when I was writing Solstices.1 Moving towards and away
from the older poet, MacNeice highlights a similarity in their poetry but
also draws attention to the differences between their poetic servants, lust
and rage and fear and resentment. They share something in their works
negative turn but also differ in era, and hence response, the world we live
in being a different place twenty-odd years after Yeatss death. Further-
more, the fear and resentment in the volume are being presented in the
context of Yeatss work: performed in the presence of the older poet or
constructed within a Yeatsian landscape, implicitly paralleling, diverging
from, and contesting aspects of Yeatss work.
This studys opening chapter revised the terms in which MacNeice and
Yeats are read alongside one another through to the early 1940s. In the
subsequent four chapters, Yeats has been a background presence in the
accounts of MacNeices interactions with the work of other Irish poets. As
these discussions have suggested, in the late 1940s and early 1950s
MacNeice considered Yeats primarily in relation to the attachment
between poet and place, as shown in the treatment of landscape in Holes
in the Sky or the Yeatsian characterization of Dylan Thomas in Autumn
Sequel. However, in the late 1950s as MacNeice tried to pursue (in the
rather vague terms he used at the time) more fundamental or universal
1
Louis MacNeice, Louis MacNeice Writes . . . (on The Burning Perch), Poetry Book
Society Bulletin 38 (September 1963), repr. in Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice,
ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 2478. The collection was the autumn
1963 choice of the society. An accompanying note reads: This contribution by Louis
MacNeice must have been one of the last things that he wrote before his death on
3 September 1963. He sent it with a letter dated August 26th, apologising for delay.
MacNeices Byzantium 159

inward questions, prompted by consciousnesss experience of existence, he
engaged with Yeats as a poet concerned with the old chronic unanswer-
ables.2 More specically, several poems in MacNeices nal volume, The
Burning Perch (1963), inhabit the particularly Yeatsian terrain of Byzan-
tium to test a range of ideas and positions through which Yeats defended
art, such as the use of history, platonic mysticism, and poetic form. By
exploring a Byzantine terrain in relation to Yeatss work, the volume offers
an altogether more chastening position for the poet in relation to the past.
In the context of twentieth-century Irish poetry, MacNeices late work
radically reapproaches Yeatss poetry as a vehicle for ongoing thought amid
modernity, while also resituating the broader Irish tradition within a
transnational, post-Romantic, and post-modernist cultural terrain.3
The phrase lust and rage comes from Yeatss late poem The Spur,
which MacNeice would probably have rst read in Last Poems and Plays
(1940).4 The volumes opening two poems, The Gyres and Lapis
Lazuli, present a particular conception of history.5 The gyres are the
spinning cones that, in Yeatss philosophical system as set out in A Vision
(1937), govern alternate subjective and objective historical eras.6 Every
2,000 years, it is asserted, a new era is inaugurated by a new god and the
Christian eraan age of necessity, truth, goodness, mechanism, science,
democracy, abstraction, peacewill give way in 2000 ad to an antithet-
ical more subjective phase that will, like Greek antiquity, be an age of
freedom, ction, evil, kindred, art, aristocracy, particularity, war.7 The
Gyres is a hymn to the destructive forces of historical change that will
bring this era to a close. It asks: What matter though numb nightmare
ride on top | And blood and mire the sensitive body stain? In the face of
an impending apocalyptic end to the present civilization, Yeatss persona
can laugh in tragic joy knowing that another age will arise at its more
vigorous beginning.
2
Louis MacNeice, Being Simple (review of J.M. Cohen, Poetry of this Age: 1908 to
1958), The Spectator 204.6868 (12 February 1960), 2256.
3
For further non-Irish perspectives on MacNeices late engagements with Yeats, par-
ticularly in relation to modernism and T.S. Eliot, see: Tom Walker, MacNeices Byzan-
tium: The Ghosts of Yeats and Eliot in The Burning Perch, The Review of English Studies
62.257 (November 2011), 785804.
4
(London: Macmillan, 1957), 591. W.B. Yeats, Last Poems and Plays (1940), was reviewed
by MacNeice in New Republic 103.26 (24 June 1940), repr. in Selected Literary Criticism,
ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 11619.
5
6
MacNeice probably read the 1937 edition, for which there is a receipt dated 28 June
1939 in: Bodleian Library, MacNeice Papers, Box 14.
7
W.B. Yeats, A Vision (2nd edn, London: Macmillan, 1937), 52.

Lapis Lazuli follows with it hysterical women who are sick of poets
that are always gay and, in semi-parody of these hysterical women, Yeats
outlines a world on the brink of war:
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten at.
The poem then presents other (implicitly more creative and wise)
responses to catastrophe. Shakespeares actors know better than to:
break up their lines to weep. | They know Hamlet and Lear are gay. In
considering the artist in relation to old civilisations put to the sword,
Yeats asserts that: All things fall and are built again | And those that build
them again are gay. Artists are shown to understand the cyclical nature of
history or, at least, an appropriate response to history seems to be part of
true arts methods. The concept of tragic joyan exhilarating mingling
of contrary emotions in the face of the destruction that one knows will
lead to a more vigorous era, being necessarily part of the same historical
processprovides a sanction for the poems of lust and rage that follow in
Last Poems and Plays.
The phrase Hamlet and Lear are gay stayed with MacNeice. He
quoted it in The Poetry of W.B. Yeats when comparing Yeats to Eliot:
there is a basic difference in their gloom, Eliots tending to be defeatist
where Yeatss is heroic, Eliots involving the abasement of the individual,
Yeatss enhancing his individualityHamlet and Lear are gay.8 For
MacNeice the phrase represented Yeatss zest for life and death, his valuing
of created things and the heroic individual in the face of their inevitable
destruction. It becomes a touchstone for the general attitude towards life
advocated in Yeatss late work, as is apparent in MacNeices review of the
posthumous Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (1950):
He said of himself that as he grew older his poetry grew younger, and his
latter-day text seems to have been the paradox that Hamlet and Lear are
gay. He deplored no less bitterly than some younger poets much that was
happening in the world, but, unlike them and partly perhaps because of his
cyclic philosophy and his doctrine of the Masks, he was too much of a
tragedian ever to become a pessimist.9
8
Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (London: Oxford University Press,
1941), 222.
9
Louis MacNeice, Great Riches (review of The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats), The
Observer 8308 (27 August 1950), repr. in Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice,
1713.

The phrase also returned in an article published in 1954 in response to the
death of Dylan Thomas: Yeats describes the poet as one who knows that
Hamlet and Lear are gay. No poet of our time was a better example of
this than Dylan Thomas.10
MacNeices Budgie from The Burning Perch subjects Yeatss concept of
tragic joy and the attitude to history on which it rests to certain new
historical pressures.11 In the opening sentence, the budgerigars voice, a
small I Am, not only makes an obvious reference to Descartes cogito ergo
sum but also points to Coleridge, who, in Biographia Literaria (1817),
denes the primary imagination as: the living power and prime agent of
all human perception, and as a reception in the nite mind of the eternal act
of creation in the innite I AM.12 Through these echoes, MacNeice reveals
the bird to be an amalgamated rationalist philosopher and Romantic poet,
embodying the Enlightenments beginning and end. Beyond the cage there
might be galaxies, stars, or even those four far walls of the sitting room: But
for all this small blue bundle could bother | Its beak, there is only itself and
the universe. Solipsistic, man (or rather bird) as its own god, the budgie is
asserting a mannered self (Let me attitudinize) yet is rendered ridiculous by
the fact that it is a budgerigar staring at itself in a mirror, described by
MacNeice in Modern Poetry (1938), as a symbol of nihilism via solipsism.13
This poet-philosopher birds self-absorption and detachment offers a
position in relation to history that is analogous to the tragic joy advocated
in The Gyres and Lapis Lazuli. Like those poems, the end of Budgie
suggests imminent catastrophe:
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 nal messages,
But the budgerigar was not born for nothing,
He stands at his post on the burning perch
I twitter Amand peeps like a television
Actor admiring himself in the monitor.
10
Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas: Memories and Appreciations, Encounter 2.1
(January 1954), 1213.
11
2007), 602.
12
S.T. Coleridge, Biographica Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and
Opinions, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, I (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1983), 304. Lurking behind this denition is Gods assertion of his name to Moses: I AM
THAT I AM, Exodus 3.14.
13
1938), 175.

In the face of the destructive moment apparently at hand, MacNeices bird
appears to be summoning up the appropriate response within Yeatss
terms: it continues to sing its song of self, with I twitter Am paralleling
Yeatss assertion that All things fall and are built again | And those that
build them again are gay and his cry of what matter. But in Budgie the
restaging of this Yeatsian response offers little consolation, because the
bird is not placed within a scheme in which one era of western civilization
will end and another arise. Instead, the prospect of a nuclear apocalypse
fundamentally undermines Yeatss cyclical conception of history, render-
ing his philosophically detached position of tragic joy absurd. The poem,
as Longley describes, is an anticipation of nal holocaust, a warning of
nemesis.14 It is not just a civilization declining; the human race recedes
and dwindles and the gorillas exchange nal messages. The poet cannot
look on gaily in hope of the future to come: there will be no future at all.
In this context, the budgerigar bathetically morphs from a grand Yeatsian
tragedian into the boy standing on the burning deck in Felicia Dorothea
Hemanss Casabianca (1826), calling out to a father who cannot hear
him as the ames approach.15
That this end might be nuclear-assisted is further implied by This is the
Life, the poem that directly precedes Budgie in The Burning Perch.16 It
depicts a group of elderly American women going down to a shelter,
ending:
And every day in the dark below the desert will be one
of both independence and thanksgiving
So they never need worry again as to what may fall out of the sky
But whenever they want can have a Pharaohs portion
of turkey and pumpkin pie.
In the time between the 1930s (when Yeats wrote of bomb-balls falling
in Lapis Lazuli) and the early 1960s, the words fall out of the sky had
attracted a new and even more sinister connotation. The phrase fall-out
had come to refer to the radioactive refuse from a nuclear explosion, with
the OEDs rst listed use in this way dating from a 1950 British govern-
ment publication.17 By 1963 not only might bombs fall out of the sky,
but they could cause nuclear fall-out. Peter McDonald argues that the
poems in The Burning Perch are preoccupied with a future under various
incalculable threats and these frequently include the possibility of nuclear
14
15
The Poetical Works of Felicia Dorothea Hemans (London: Oxford University Press,
1914), 396.
16
17
Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edn, 1989).

annihilation, such as the Greyness is All, with its ominous nal switch,
contrived by men:
To black out all the worlds of men
And demons too but even then
Whether that black will not prove grey
No one may wait around to say.18
The nal section of As In Their Time also, as Longley notes, portends a
nuclear Nemesis with the appearance of a terminal mushroom cloud no
bigger than a gods hand.19
Much of MacNeices other writing during the period also testies to a
preoccupation with the splitting of the atom and its consequences. In a
review of Sean OCaseys Under a Coloured Cap (1963), he writes: It
would be nice to have OCaseys faith in the will, the common sense, and
above all the power of the people. Having this faith he is not unduly
alarmed by nuclear energy.20 In the posthumously published Varieties of
Parable (1965), he contended that the one really peculiar thing in our
world is the Bomb, arguing that:
however much we have realized the implications of that with our heads, we
have not yet grown into that realization: the possibility of death for the whole
human race is not something we live with as we live with the certainty of our
own individual deaths.21
As can be seen in the poems quoted above, MacNeice was much preoccu-
pied with trying to communicate this realization. His radio drama The
Administrator (1961), for instance, dramatizes the predicament of a
nuclear physicist, Jerry, who has been offered a job as the head of a
prestigious government institute that develops nuclear weapons. He
expresses his concerns to a younger colleague, Bill:
bill: Still, you believe theyre right, the unilateralist boys?
jerry: Theyre the only ones whore not wrong.
That night he dreams of an old ame, Eunice, who asks him What is
your weapon then, sweetie-pie?, to which he replies Uranium 285; later
on Bill appears in his dream and tells him that the reactors become
18
1991), 4912; MacNeice Collected Poems, 598.
19
Longley, Louis MacNeice, 163; MacNeice, Collected Poems, 601.
20
Louis MacNeice, The Ould Opinioneer (review of Sean OCasey, Under a
Coloured Cap), The New Statesman 65.1677 (3 May 1963), 6789.
21
Louis MacNeice, Varieties of Parable (1965; London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 15.

critical.22 The Mad Islands (1962) expresses concern over the splitting of
the atom through a dream-like Faustian fable. The protagonist Muldoon
arrives at the Island of Progress and goes to see the Inventor, a mad
scientist gure, who asks him if hes brought a pound of this new
stuffuranium. The nuclear resonance established, the Inventor eluci-
dates his theory of matter:
There are more winds blowing through this single stone then youd nd in the
whole cave of Aeolus. Now these winds couldnt blow at all if they had no
space to blow in. Spaceroom for experiment. But for what kind of experi-
ment? Youll be surprised when I tell you. This could make or break the world.
Subsequently the stone is split and a whirlwind released and the episode
predictably ends in an explosion.23
MacNeice had already drawn on such imagery in relation to a possible
nuclear explosion in the last section of the eponymous closing sequence in
Visitations. Its rst stanza observes that the Lord was not in the whirlwind
but rather sat in the cave looking out as London is whipped away into
interstellar negation.24 The second stanza has the Lord again not in the
atom, this time in a bar watching his tumbler erupting | A genie that grew
like a mushroom, deleting the Words of Creation. Updating Platos
Allegory of the Cave from book VII of The Republiclike Budgie, a
further image of suspect reectionGod has become analogous to Platos
chained prisoners, sat in the cave of his mind (and the cave was the world) |
Among old worked ints between insight and hindsight, disempowered,
and at a remove from a higher reality.25 Indeed he appears to be rather like
an unfashionable thirties poet, trapped in what Alan Gillis describes as a
cosmic bureaucratic vacuity, hanging around his ofce or the pub,
underappreciated, overlooked, and politically meaningless, helplessly
looking on at the unfolding apocalypse.26 God is subject to a loss of
agency according to the paradox of man-made technology that Mac-
Neice had articulated in The Strings are False, when faced with the
prospect of chemical warfare during the Second World War: It begins
with sheer creative imagination and it endsat least that is how it looks in
1940in a brute and random necessity, a negation of human freedom.27
22
Louis MacNeice, The Mad Islands and The Administrator: Two Radio Plays (London:
Faber and Faber, 1964), 79, 90, 109.
23 24
Ibid., 413. MacNeice, Collected Poems, 523.
25
26
University Review 42.1 (2012), 10523: 110.
27
Louis MacNeice, The Strings are False: An Unnished Autobiography (1965; London:
Faber and Faber, 1982), 32.

The results of technology looked even more like an utter negation of
human freedom by 1957.
The association of apocalypse with a whirlwind in this section of
Visitations echoes Ezekiels vision of the glory of God as a whirlwind
and its prophecies of the end of Israel: the end is come upon the four
corners of the land.28 The reversal in the poem is that God is no longer
the force behind such destruction. This association of divinity and apoca-
lypse also echoes Yeatss later work. In Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen
(1921), the speaker acknowledges the coming of apocalyptic winds of
winter in the face of which art will struggle to survive, as the half-
imagined, the half-written page will be destroyed by this rage | To end
all things.29 The refrain of The Black Tower (1939) portrays the winds
as presaging the millennium to come: They shake when the winds roar, |
Old bones upon the mountain shake.30 MacNeices work through the late
1950s and into the early 1960s, fearful of the contemporary world, is
saturated with images of nuclear apocalypse. In voicing this preoccupa-
tion, MacNeice is also doing so in the context of Yeatss work as the
pre-eminent twentieth-century poetic prophet of civilization-ending
destruction. He is drawing on Yeatss imagery to contest Yeatss attitude
towards such destruction. For Yeats, the apocalypse is to be welcomed and
responded to in a mood of tragic joy, based on the knowledge that
something will be built again. For MacNeice the development of the
bomb means that even God now looks on without the expectation of
much of a future. However, an ambiguous encounter at the end of
Visitations, as God sits in the cave of his mind, seems to counter this
gloomy prognosis: Suddenly Something sheds a new light on the cave
and a still small voice | In spite of ill winds and ill atoms blossomed in pure
afrmation.31 An attitude like tragic joy is induced by this new, light-
shedding visitor, as the poet-like God can give voice to afrmation. This
reaction is different from that advocated by Yeats. It attempts to afrm
lifes value in spite of the impending end, rather than nd a point of
intellectual refuge from imminent destruction through a cyclical concep-
tion of history and a faith in the permanence of art.
To return to Budgie, an interrogation of some of the consolatory
positions found through art by Yeats occurs through the manner in
which Budgie is on some level a rewriting of Yeatss Sailing to
28
Ezekiel 1:4 and 7:2. MacNeice rst uses the image of a whirlwind as presaging an
apocalypse in his schoolboy poem The Dissolution of Valhalla (1924). MacNeice,
Collected Poems, 654.
29 30
Variorum Yeats, 4312. Ibid., 635.
31

Byzantium, as McDonald suggests.32 Yeatss speaker wishes to leave the
mortal world of sensual music, be transported to Byzantium, gathered
into the artice of eternity and take the form of a gold bird singing on a
golden bough.33 In MacNeices poem, the bird is now a blue budgie
singing in a cage, rather than to lords and ladies, and has been transposed
from the Virgilian golden bough to a burning perch, an altogether less
permanent place on which to take a poetic stand. As McDonald points
out, MacNeice domesticates and democratizes Yeatss symbolic vocabu-
lary: the aristocratic golden bird singing to a drowsy Emperor now a
common budgerigar in a sitting room, the aloof aristocratic artist become
an Everyman.34 Like Yeatss cyclical theories of history, the symbolism of
Sailing to Byzantium is being moved forward in time by MacNeice and
so subjected to new pressures. The speakers appeal, to be transported to
eternity and reside there as a singing bird, now seems forlorn. The
immensity of the universe, newly thought to be ever-expanding, and
the arrival of space travel, with the launch of the rst manned spacecraft in
1961, has created the conditions for a far less appealing journey for
MacNeices bird. The attempt to nd a place in which to sing becomes
a voyage into complete isolation: For all the world is a stage is a cage |
A hermitage a fashion show a crche an auditorium | Or possibly a space
ship.35 The lack of commas between these places of performance com-
municates the panic and irrationality driving the associative journey as it
suddenly transforms into a literal transportation. The budgie oats off into
the vast emptiness of space, oblivious on his burning perch as the world
approaches its nal end, mustering all the artistic gravitas of a television |
Actor admiring himself in the monitor.
The parallels between the two poems are further illuminated by Mac-
Neices earlier critical response to Sailing to Byzantium. The Poetry of
W.B. Yeats describes Byzantium in Yeatss poem as representing a world
of Platonic Forms free of the ux of Becoming. Noting that eternity in
the poem means the artice of eternity, he writes that: Yeats is still,
though reluctantly, asserting the supremacy of art, art, as always for him,
having a supernatural sanction. This is supported by a quotation from
Yeatss Meditations in Time of Civil War (1923):
32
Peter McDonald, Louis MacNeice: The Burning Perch, in Neil Roberts, ed., A Com-
panion to Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 4919: 498.
33
34
McDonald, Louis MacNeice: The Burning Perch, 498.
35
Section X of As in Their Time links the ever-expanding universe with a loss of
individuality: Citizen of an ever-expanding | Universe, burning smokeless fuel, | He had
lived among plastic gear so long | When they decided to ngerprint him | He left no
ngerprints at all (MacNeice, Collected Poems, 600).

The abstract joy,
The half-read wisdom of daemonic images,
Sufce the ageing man as once the growing boy.36
MacNeice explains that Yeats:
seems here to use the epithet abstract in a mystical sense, to represent not
any quick shorthand formula but something like what a mystic might mean
when speaking of Absolute Blue. Byzantium is a world where Blue is always
blue, unlike the physical world where a blue object changes with every
change in the light.37
Gold rather than blue would seem to be the dominant colour of Yeatss
Byzantiumrened, precious, and betting of an eternal realm of endur-
ing art in which his (and others) poems will eternally sing Of what is past,
passing, or to come. Indeed, Yeatss use of blue in his poetry is relatively
rare, mainly early, and conventionally descriptive.38 But MacNeice is not
so much responding directly to Yeatss symbolism as unpacking its meta-
physical basis. In this regard, his choice of blue as an example of an
absolute echoes a passage in A Vision, in which Michael Robartes unveils
Ledas egg:
Mary Bell then opened the ivory box and took from it an egg the size of a
swans egg, and standing between us and the dark window-curtains, lifted it
up that we might all see its colour. Hyacinthine blue, according to the Greek
lyric poet, said Robartes. I bought it from an old man in a green turban at
Tehran; it had come down from eldest son to eldest son for many gener-
ations. No, said Aherne, you never were in Tehran. Perhaps Aherne is
right, said Robartes. Sometimes my dreams discover facts, and sometimes
lose them, but it does not matter. I bought this egg from an old man in a
green turban in Arabia, or Persia or India. He told me its history, partly
handed down by word of mouth, partly as he had discovered it in ancient
manuscripts. It was for a time in the treasury of Harun Al-Rashid and had
come there from Byzantium, as ransom for a prince of the imperial house. Its
history before that is unimportant for some centuries. During the reign of
the Antonines tourists saw it hanging by a golden chain from the roof of a
Spartan temple. Those of you who are learned in the classics will have
recognized the lost egg of Leda, its miraculous life still unquenched.39
As the product of the congress between Zeus and Leda, this blue egg
represents the worldly incarnation of the eternal. It offers a form of
36 37
Variorum Yeats, 427. MacNeice, Poetry of W.B. Yeats, 13940.
38
Stephen Maxeld Parrish, A Concordance to the Poems of W.B. Yeats, programmed by
James Allan Painter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963).
39
Yeats, A Vision, 501.

continuity between a realm of absolutes or Platonic forms and the
temporal world, as well as across different points in history, from Ancient
Greece to Byzantium to the early twentieth century. In the light of this
Yeatsian signicance and MacNeices relating of Byzantium to Absolute
Blue, blue in Budgie seems to signify something more than just a
colour. These intertextual echoes suggest that it acts as the budgies
mystical staging post against the real worlds ux and plurality. That art
can invoke an Absolute Blue might give the small blue bundle in its
small blue universe, as it does Yeats, a supernatural sanction from which
to assert the supremacy of art. But MacNeices description of Byzantium
as a world where Blue is always blue is turned against this prototype
Romantic poet-cum-rationalist philosopher. With the nuclear apocalypse
threatening the worlds very existence, whether or not there is an absolute
blue that the budgerigar embodies becomes irrelevant in the context of a
posterity undermining all absolutes.
That MacNeice is putting Yeatss Byzantium within the intellectual
framework of Platonic forms is unsurprising. The Tower, the poem that
immediately follows Sailing to Byzantium at the opening of the collec-
tion The Tower, explicitly dramatizes Yeatss interest in Plato and Plotinus,
with the speaker nally choosing to mock Plotinus thought | And cry in
Platos teeth.40 The analysis that follows in MacNeices study illustrates
not only his knowledge of Plato but also of the more obscure Neoplaton-
ism of Plotinus.41 MacNeice suggests that Yeats is replaying Platos
dialectic: all change involves an underlying permanence, all difference an
underlying unity; hence there is a distinction between a variable world of
sensible objects, of becoming or of self, and a constant world of forms, of
being or of soul. In Sailing to Byzantium, MacNeice argues that it is the
soul that is allowed to have its say, the soul, which contemplates Being as
opposed to the self embroiled in Becoming; but at other times the self has
the last word, as his philosophy becomes one of antinomies.42 MacNeice
registers Yeatss dissatisfaction with this dialectic:
In [Yeatss] own system he wanted to avoid the split, the chorismos, in Platos
between the worlds of Being and Becoming, to vindicate the passionate
fragmentary men who do not see beyond their own horizon but are never-
theless the vehicle of dynamic eternal principles; they need those principles
40
41
MacNeice discusses studying Plato at Oxford in The Strings are False, 1246. He also
reviewed several books on Plato during the 1930s. See A Bibliography of Short Prose by
Louis MacNeice, in Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1990), 27592: 2768.
42

to motivate their actions but their principles also need them as a means to
realization. Yeats naturally reacted against Platos extreme intellectualism and
therefore, as he explains in his introduction to The Words upon the Window-
pane, preferred Plotinus who was the rst to establish as sole source the
timeless individuality or daimon instead of the Platonic idea, to prefer
Socrates to his thought. This timeless individuality contains archetypes of
all possible existences, whether of man or brute, and as it traverses its circle of
allotted lives, now one, now another, prevails.43
That dynamic eternal principles need passionate fragmentary men relates
to MacNeices earlier description of Yeats asserting the supremacy of art
and its supernatural sanction in Sailing to Byzantium. MacNeice sees
that Yeats is using Plotinus revision of Plato to bolster the position of the
poet on both sides of this soul-versus-self or being-versus-becoming
dialectic. For Yeats, the artist, as the epitome of the individual, is a part
of the divine or the eternal not only in his or her ability to apprehend a
world of forms in a transcendental manner, but also as an agent of
dynamic eternal principles in the sensible world. Value is found in art
as both a mystical abstraction and as the assertion of personality.
In overcoming the split between being and becoming in Platos dia-
lectic, and nding a place for the individual within the universal, Plotinus
in The Enneads posits a hierarchical worldview.44 As Brian Arkins outlines,
at the top of a hierarchy of three hypostases within a metaphysical
Intelligible world is the ineffable One; emanating from this superabun-
dant power is Intelligence, a timeless divine mind that contains the
Platonic forms; and from Intelligence is derived Soul, subject to time,
which creates and orders the material world. This process of emanation
descends down to formless Matter, the lowest level: Consequently, when
Soul casts an image of the Forms contained in Intelligence on formless
Matter, the material world and human beings come into existence. The
souls of humans derive, therefore, from this higher universal Soul. These
individual souls may ascend to achieve union with Intelligence and with
the One, but in doing so the human soul retains its individual existence,
since it enjoys an inner identity with the whole Intelligible World and
derives its individuality from Form and not matter.45 As MacNeices
mentor E.R. Dodds wrote in his Select Passages Illustrating Neoplatonism
(1923), Plotinus sees the opposition between the individual and universal
43
Ibid., 146.
44
Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, rev. B.S. Page, foreword by
E.R. Dodds, introduction by Paul Henry (2nd edn, London: Faber and Faber, 1956).
45
Brian Arkins, Builders of My Soul: Greek and Roman Themes in Yeats (Gerrards Cross:
Colin Smythe, 1990), 35.

as false due to the limiting and polarising inuence of Matter; taken at his
centre, the individual is the universal, and it is precisely when his empirical
self is discarded that his true individuality is most fully afrmed.46
In the context of Plotinus philosophy and Yeatss appropriation of such
systems of thought in Sailing to Byzantium, Budgie depicts an assertion
of self in a world where connection to any higher universal metaphysical
property, such as Soul, has broken down. The image of the birds tail as a
needle on a missing disc, as well as describing the movement of a perched
birds tail, implies a disconnection between the birds voice and any larger
animating principle. This underlines the separation from the divine or
eternal realm implied by the birds voice being only a small I Am, again
suggesting that the budgies song of self is mere attitudinizing.
Looking beyond Budgie, Doddss close relationship with MacNeice
suggests a more extensive degree of contact between the younger poets
thought and Yeatss interests in Neoplatonism than has previously been
considered. As discussed in Chapter 1, in 1934 MacNeice was taken for
tea at Yeatss house by Dodds:
Yeats in spite of his paunch was elegant in a smooth light suit and a just
sufciently crooked bow tie. His manner was hierophantic, even when he
said: This afternoon I have been playing croquet with my daughter. We
were hoping he would talk poetry and gossip, but knowing that Dodds was a
professor of Greek he conned the conversation to spiritualism and the
phases of the moon, retailing much that he had already printed. Burnet,
Yeats said, was all wrong; the Ionian physicists had of course not been
physicists at all. The Ionian physicists were spiritualists.
He talked a great deal about the spirits to whom his wife, being a medium,
had introduced him. Have you ever seen them? Dodds asked (Dodds could
never keep back such questions). Yeats was a little piqued. No, he said
grudgingly, he had never actually seen them . . . butwith a ash of
triumphhe had often smelt them.47
The mocking tone of MacNeices description seems to align him with
Audens famous assessment of Yeats as silly, but this need not occlude the
shared intellectual ground that the encounter signals.48 The presence of
Dodds suggests where this may lie: spiritualism and Yeatss Byzantinism,
meaning not only the ancient city as a historical place and culture, but also
46
E.R. Dodds, ed. and trans., Select Passages Illustrating Neoplatonism (London: Society
for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1923), 15.
47
48
W.H. Auden, In Memory of W.B. Yeats, in The English Auden: Poems, Essays and
Dramatic Writings 19271939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber: 1977),
2413.

the Neoplatonic philosophical and spiritual ideas that underpin Yeatss
notion of Byzantium as an eternal spiritual realm.
MacNeice had become friends with Dodds while a classics lecturer at
the University of Birmingham, where Dodds was head of department.
Dodds went on to become Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford in 1936.
He is probably now best known for his 1951 study The Greeks and
the Irrational, but his earlier research focused on Neoplatonism. Dodds
was in close contact with the Irishman Stephen MacKenna, the translator
of Plotinus The Enneads, and he edited a posthumous selection of
MacKennas journal and letters.49 He was in Dublin conducting the research
for the introductory memoir of the translator when he visited Yeats with
MacNeice. Yeats had enthusiastically read Plotinus in MacKennas
translation; in his letters, MacKenna recounts the story of Yeats entering
a bookshop, requesting a copy of the newly published translation of the
fourth Ennead and reading it straight through there and then.50 Dodds,
though, was also a direct source of information on ancient philosophy and
religion for Yeats:
I suppose my answers went into the stew-pot from which there eventually
emerged the most unreadable of his works though in his view the most
important, the book called A Vision. And as Mr. Thomas Shiel has pointed
out to me, I even contributed, unwittingly, one phrase to which Yeats has
given enduring life. In the introduction to my earliest book, Select Passages
Illustrating Neoplatonism, published in 1923, I had quoted a pagan neo-
Platonists description of Christianity as a fabulous and formless darkness
mastering the loveliness of the world. The phrase that fabulous and formless
darkness reappears in A Vision where it is ascribed (correctly) to a philoso-
pher of the fourth century. And it appears again a few years later in a justly
famous lyric:
The Babylonian starlight brought
A fabulous, formless darkness in;
Odour of blood when Christ was slain
Made all Platonic tolerance vain
And vain all Doric discipline.51
Dodds shared Yeatss interest in the occult too, serving on the council of
the Society for Psychical Research from 1927, and as its president from
49
Journal and Letters of Stephen MacKenna, ed. with a memoir by E.R. Dodds, preface
by Padraic Colum (London: Constable, 1936).
50
Stephen MacKenna to E.R. Debenham, October 1926, Journal and Letters of Stephen
MacKenna, 235.
51
E.R. Dodds, Missing Persons: An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 60;
the quotation is from Two Songs from a Play, Variorum Yeats, 438.

1961 to 1963, although he described his interest as that of a historian of
ideas rather than a believer.52
The interests that Dodds shared with Yeats, as well as the personality of
MacKenna, appear to have had some inuence on MacNeice. He
reviewed the journal and letters, and in Eclogue from Iceland memorial-
ized MacKennas twenty years spent translating Greek philosophy | Ill
and tormented, unwilling to break contract.53 Plotinus also appears
extensively in Tea-Tray in the Sky (1934), a novel by MacNeices friend
Graham Shepard (later memorialized in The Casualty). The authors
note thanks Dodds for permission to quote from his Passages Illustrating
Neo-Platonism and notes that Stephen MacKenna, who died while the
book was going to press, is mentioned during the course of it as though
still being alive.54 In terms that resemble MacNeices future assessment of
the philosopher as Yeatss means of bridging the gap between becoming
and being, a character in the book repeatedly discusses Neoplatonism as a
solution to reconciling the phenomenal and spiritual worlds: by making
our causality less rigidly continuous we can link material realism with the
various aspects of supernatural reality, as mystics perceive it, in one
unbroken harmonious whole.55 The presence of such material suggests
that Neoplatonism formed a part of the conversations that Dodds,
MacNeice, and Shepard were having during the 1930s.
As discussed above, an awareness of the work of Plotinus fed into
MacNeices study of Yeats. It may have inuenced the advocacy of a
limited mysticism in the preface: The faith in the value of living is a
mystical faith.56 This quasi-mystical position underpinned much of what
MacNeice wrote in response to the war in the 1940s, but his work of the
late 1950s and early 1960s also engages extensively with the possibility of
the mystical. To relate MacNeices interest in such metaphysical matters
solely to the inuence of Plotinus would be misleading. As William
T. McKinnon argues, MacNeice approached the problem of reality
with the attitudes and concepts of metaphysics throughout his career.57
In a letter to Anthony Blunt in 1928 he had written: How good it wld be
to be a mystic (ie. not an actor, everyone else is an actor) & be fused with
52
Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Dodds, Eric Robertson (18931979), Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Dodds, Missing Persons, 601.
53
Louis MacNeice, Stephen MacKenna: A Writer who had the Courage of his
Instincts (review of Journal and Letters of Stephen MacKenna, ed. E.R. Dodds), Morning
Post (4 December 1936), 19; MacNeice, Collected Poems, 78.
54
Graham Shepard, Tea-Tray in the Sky (London: Arthur Baker, 1934), 6.
55 56
Ibid., 2356. MacNeice, Poetry of W.B. Yeats, viii.
57
MacNeice (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 95.

the universe.58 He drew not only on his reading in ancient philosophy
but also on the ideas of modern idealists such as F.H. Bradley and
Giovanni Gentile, whose works he had studied at Oxford while being
tutored by Geoffrey Mure, one of Oxfords few remaining neo-Hegelians.59
McKinnon suggests that the problem of the Many and the One was
perhaps the central problem for MacNeice. While the absolute as a lurking
menace is the theme of many poems, there also exists an important residual
longing, despite all the resistance and denial, for a religious or mystical
identication with the One.60 Though MacNeice often reected on his
relationship to reality in metaphysical and mystical terms, a shift seems to
occur in his later work in the way these issues are approached.
McKinnon detects an increased hope in MacNeices later work that the
presence of the universal may be divined, arguing that in Round the
Corner: the glinting wave actually manifests the presence of the universal
[ . . . ]. There seems no doubt that he had found the real or ideal, as well as
the actual.61 Within the unfolding dialectic of parable and lyric in
MacNeices late collections, a perception of the universal comes into
focus in several other poems, often in more overt metaphysical terms
than in Round the Corner. The second section of Visitations depicts
a moment of unied vision: With cabbage-whites white | And blue sky
blue.62 Colours perceived as absolutes (pointing forward to the failure of
blue to offer such a mystical crutch in Budgie) fuse the particular and the
general for a moment to make the world one. In Selva Oscura, the
speaker wanders in the dark wood of middle age before sensing his own
connection to the universal. He recognizes that good can also be where
I am when a shaft of light signals that the world, though more, is also
I.63 MacNeice seeks and sometimes nds a similar kind of metaphysical
consolation to the Unity of Being advocated by Yeats.64 However, as the
reconguration in Budgie of Sailing to Byzantium as an apocalyptic
nightmare suggests, MacNeice also scrutinizes Yeatss particular sense of
the universal and the absolute.
MacNeices sequence Donegal Triptych, already discussed at some
length in Chapter 5, operates within Yeatsian terrain, with another rewrit-
ing of Sailing to Byzantium. Its rst section renegotiates the coordinates
of departure and arrival in Yeatss poems, embracing, in an oxymoronic
58
Louis MacNeice to Anthony Blunt, 4 June 1928, in Letters of Louis MacNeice, ed.
59
60
McKinnon, Apollos Blended Dream, 95, 86, 92.
61
Ibid., 104; MacNeice, Collected Poems, 578.
62
63 64
Ibid., 5712. MacNeice, Poetry of W.B. Yeats, 156.

phrase that echoes Yeatss tragic joy, the glad sad poetry of departure,
but eschewing Yeatss dream of arrival in Byzantium: Once arrived,
clocks disclose | That each arrival means returning. Within this state of
recurring departure, the third sections apprehension of a moment of ideal
unity, again gured in terms of blue (where the nether blue meets the
upper blue), leads to a poetic position being found within time on a
heathered and weathered perch, reworking the symbolism of Yeatss
transposition into eternity. MacNeices moment of transcendence occurs
through the cumulative experience of time, despite the contrary sense of
the passing of time undermining the possibility of such moments being
sustained.65 The opening and closing nonsense refrain of Invocation,
Dolphin plunge, fountain play. | Fetch me far and far away, recalls Yeatss
subsequent Byzantium, in which dolphins carry blood-begotten spirits
to the eternal world.66 The third stanzas when the painted cock shall
crow recongures Yeatss golden bird singing on a golden bough that
can like the cocks of Hades crow. The poem, though, pulls in a contra-
Yeatsian direction. The repeated call to fetch me far my suggests several
possible ellipses. It could be meant in the sense of fetch me far to my or
fetch me from afar my, in which case the poet is asking to be brought
before various earthly memories. It could also be meant in the sense of
fetch me far from my and the plea could be to be transported from such
material things. Or there could be no ellipsis and it is actually the
memories and experiences themselves that will fetch the speaker far. The
speaker may be asking to be carried from worldly objects and experiences,
but there is also the sense that they have taken him a considerable distance,
validating the value of life as a quest (a key term in late MacNeice). These
possible senses are kept in play in the third stanzas request to: Fetch me
far my waking day | That I may dance before I go. Is the speaker asking to
be fetched from his waking day after death, to some kind of afterlife, so
that he may enjoy life, may dance, before death? Or is it the cumulative
experience of life, having been fetched far by his waking day, that is going
to allow him to dance before dying? By the end, the second of these
possibilities seems to have won out and the poem can be read as a poem of
lyrical celebration in the face of nihilistic denial where the imagery is of
quest and attainment: Fetch me far one draught of grace | To quench my
thirst before it kills.67 The fullling journey is life, rather than to be
fetched from life, with this one draft of grace placed in the same syntactic
65
66
Variorum Yeats, 4978; MacNeice, Collected Poems, 5278.
67
Terence Brown, Louis MacNeice: Sceptical Vision (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan,
1975), 103.

position as the previous memories and experiences that had fetched the
speaker far. Yeatss desire to be transported to an eternal realm, to become
a singing bird scorning all complexities of mire and blood, is undercut by
the assertion of the value of the life lived; a precarious kind of unity is
found through the cumulative effect of life on the self.
A distinction can be made between two alternative senses of Unity of
Being through the intertextual workings of these poems: Yeatss vision of
liberation from this life in Byzantium or something to be understood at
moments in this life through the cumulative experience of the phenom-
enal world. In several of MacNeices later poems, perceptions of the
surface of the ephemeral present suddenly take on tremendous depth,
either through the workings of memory or through the apprehension of an
absolute, in a manner that can be comforting (as in the poems discussed
above) or disturbing, as in Soap Suds: But the ball is lost and the mallet
slipped long since from the hands | Under the running tap that are not the
hands of a child.68 Doddss interpretation of Plotinus may play a part in
this revision of Yeatss mysticism. As Dodds outlines in a 1959 lecture,
Tradition and Personal Achievement in the Philosophy of Plotinus:
The technique of attainment is not for him physiological or magical, but
intellectual. He prescribes no breathing exercises, no navel-brooding, no
hypnotic repetition of sacred syllables. [ . . . ] the unitive experience is in
his system a natural event, not a supernatural grace as in Christian mysti-
cism. The human spirit is not replaced by another, as in Philo or Montan-
ism, where ecstasy is a kind of possession. In Plotinus, the self is not
obliterated but regained; he sees the experience as an awakening to myself
(4.8.I.I). Nor does the divine self await liberation, as in Gnosticism; it awaits
only discoverythere is no drama of redemption.
Plotinus notion of mystical union is not one of substitution or obliter-
ation of the self, or of passive liberation of the self from this life. It is a
moment of assurance experienced by the intellect that the outcome of the
regressive dialectic, by which it is argued that the existence of the relative
implies the necessity of an absolute, is no hollow abstraction, that the
minus signs of the via negativa are in reality plus signs [ . . . ]. It is, as it
were, the experimental verication of the abstract proposition that the
One is Good.69 MacNeice in Donegal Triptych and Invocation may
68
69
E.R. Dodds, Tradition and Personal Achievement in the Philosophy of Plotinus,
paper read at Third International Congress of Classical Studies, September 1959, published
in Journal of Roman Studies 50 (1960), repr. in E.R. Dodds, The Ancient Concept of Progress
and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 12639:
1379.

not only be contesting Yeatss vision of Byzantium, but offering in its
place moments of union that are closer to the experience of mystical
union outlined by Plotinus.
* * *
MacNeice is undermining Yeatss conception of Byzantium on several
fronts. In the context of the nuclear present, MacNeice tests and nds
wanting Yeatss attempts to nd a privileged position for the poet outside
of the vicissitudes of time, whether that be through the literal liberation
from time into a metaphysical eternity or the more intellectual escape of
being able to summon the appropriate attitude of tragic joy in the face of
epoch-ending destruction, based on a conception of history as cyclical and
art as the eternal realm. Beyond attempting to dismantle Yeatss Byzantine
sanctuary in Budgie, MacNeice elsewhere in The Burning Perch shows
how both of these privileged positions are based on an idealized reading of
the past. As A Vision outlines, Yeatss sense of cyclical history rests on the
assertion that certain places at certain points in history attain a complete
unity of being. This is in part based on an interpretation of Byzantium at a
particular historical moment as representing such a place and time, an
interpretation that sanctions the vision of Byzantium as symbolizing an
eternal kingdom in which the artist may nd sanctuary.
While writing and drawing together the poems in The Burning Perch,
MacNeice reviewed Between the Lines: W.B. Yeatss Poetry in the Making
(1963), Jon Stallworthys study of Yeatss manuscripts.70 MacNeice picks
out Yeatss prose synopsis of Byzantium as particularly interesting, but
although he praises Stallworthy for skilfully guiding the reader through
the mazes and permutations of such material, he disagrees with Stall-
worthys reading of the poem, differing on whether the line breathless
mouths may summon refers to the poets or to the mummys mouth.
Between the Lines also contains a chapter on the drafts of Sailing to
Byzantium, in which Stallworthy considers the origin of the line sages
standing in Gods holy re, arguing that the lines on a particular sheet:
prove that in this instance Yeats drew his inspiration from Ravenna, which
he had visited in 1907:
aged
And most of all an old thought harried me
Standing in gold on church or pedestal
Apostle
70
Louis MacNeice, Yeats at Work (review of Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines), The
Listener 69.1773 (21 March 1963), repr. in Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice,
23941.

Angel, vestal or emperors lost in gold
wave of
O dolphin haunted, & ooding gold
might
fold
sight
bold
There is in the church of San Apollinare Nuovo a frieze consisting of two
great panels. Against a common background of gold stand, in the one, the
holy virgins, and in the other, the holy martyrs. These noble gures must
have been in Yeatss mind when he wrote Angel, vestal or emperors lost in
gold: on F. 8v they become Saints & apostles.71
As well as nding this reference to the mosaics at Ravenna, Stallworthy
also asserts that the Emperor and his Lady in Yeatss poem may well have
originated as Justinian and Theodora, who ruled from 527 to 565 ad.72
In Ravenna, from The Burning Perch, MacNeice not only recounts his
own visit to the Italian town but also revisits Yeatss ground as presented
by Stallworthy:
What do I remember of my visit to Ravenna? Firstly,
That I had come from Venice where I had come from Greece
So that my eyes seemed dim and the world at. Secondly,
That after Tintorettos illusory depth and light
The mosaics knocked me at. There they stood. The geese
Had hissed as they pecked the corn from Theodoras groin,
Yet here she stands on the wall of San Vitale, as bright
As life and a long shot taller, self-made empress,
Who patronised the monophysites and the Greens
And could have people impaled.73
Mutedly paralleling the opening of Sailing to Byzantium, the poem depicts
the speaker as a weary tourist, having already visited Greece and Venice. It
quickly moves from the visual impression of the mosaics to the complicated
details of history that their beauty does not imply. The geese | Had hissed as
they pecked the corn from Theodoras groin, for instance, refers to an
episode in Procopius Secret History (mid-sixth century ad). In this work
Procopius, who also wrote glorifying accounts of Justinians wars and
architectural endeavours, sets out the unsavoury background of Theodora.
After the early death of her father, she worked as an actress and prostitute,
71
Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines: W.B. Yeatss Poetry in the Making (Oxford:
72 73
Ibid., 101. MacNeice, Collected Poems, 58990.

before eventually becoming Justinians mistress, wife, and nally empress,
and Procopius account includes this strange episode with the geese:
often even in the theatre, before the eyes of the whole people, she stripped off
her clothing and moved about naked through their midst, having only a
girdle about her private parts, not however, that she was ashamed to display
these too to the populace, but because no person is permitted to enter there
entirely naked, but must have at least a girdle about the groins. Clothed in
this manner, she sprawled out and lay on her back on the ground. And some
slaves, whose duty this was, sprinkled grains of barley over her private parts,
and geese, which happened to have been provided for this very purpose,
picked them off with their beaks, one by one, and ate them.74
This historical detail is then contrasted with her depiction on the wall of
San Vitale, as bright | As life and a long shot taller. The poem moves from
the sordidness of Theodoras early life to the image of her projected by the
mosaic, drawing attention to the distance between what can be inferred
from art and artefact, and historys other truths. But the sheer strangeness
of this incident also emphasizes sixth-century Byzantiums distance from
the speakers here and now.
This is underlined by the mention of Theodoras patronage of the
Monophysites, a Christian sect of the period. Their belief that Christ
had only one nature was condemned by the Council of Chalcedon (451
ad). Justinian doggedly adhered to the Councils line, while also seeking to
bring about a compromise on the issue. Theodora appears to have had
sympathies with the Monophysite cause, whose authors referred to her as
the Believing Queen.75 Procopius explains this deance as a political
ruse: the couple pretending to disagree, with Justinian using his wife to
keep doors open to the Monophysites.76 MacNeice is complicating the
image of Theodora given by the mosaic (which sees the empress facing her
husband on the other side of the altar, with the gure of Christ repre-
sented behind and above them, the church and empire as one) in alluding
to the history of the church at that time. A further layer of estranging detail
is added in mentioning Theodoras support for the Greens. Prior to
becoming emperor, Justinian had cultivated the support of one of the
two chariot racing factions, the Blues. These organizations provided
charioteers and other performers for the games, but they also served as a
means of exerting popular political pressure. In the sixth century,
74
Procopius, The Anecdota or Secret History, trans. and ed. H.B. Dowing (London:
Heinemann, 1935), 103.
75
See John Moorhead, Justinian (London: Longman, 1994), 12033; Robert Browning,
Justinian and Theodora (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 21536.
76
Procopius, Secret History, 1257.

members of the Blues started to cause mayhem in the city, violently
repressing the Greens, but were largely immune from punishment due
to Justinians patronage.77 Theodoras father had worked for the Greens,
but when he died the man her mother then married was passed over for
the same position. The Blues took them under their protection and gave a
job to Theodoras stepfather, and she is believed to have remained a
fervent supporter of them for the rest of her life, not the Greens as
MacNeice claims, a confusion which itself underlines the ways in which
the poem complicates the mosaics depiction. Theodora might appear to
be almost present, standing on the wall of the church as bright | As Life;
but the poem surrounds her image with historical references that empha-
size the strange otherness of the world in which she lived, a world that can
only partly be glimpsed through the surviving sources and artefacts.78
Ravenna turns from sixth-century Byzantium to present another
historical perspective:
There was also and thirdly the long
Lost naval port of Caesar, surviving now in the name
In Classe: the sea today is behind the scenes
Like his Liburnian galleys.
It was Augustus Caesar who founded the port and used Liburnian galleys
at the Battle of Actium. The failure to identify this Caesar specically as
Augustus calls to mind Julius Caesars rise and assassination, and the
bloody aftermath.79 The poem reveals that another related civilization,
the Roman Empire, also lies below Ravenna and, like Byzantium, it was a
world of politics and violence. The name Caesar also echoes Yeatss use of
it in Long-legged Fly:
That civilization may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post.
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes xed upon nothing,
A hand under his head.
77
See Browning, Justinian and Theodora, 634; Cyril Mango, Byzantium and its Image:
History and Culture of the Byzantium Empire and its Heritage (London: Variorum Reprints,
1984), 33753.
78
Browning, Justinian and Theodora, 65.
79
The subject of MacNeices 1946 radio play Enter Caesar : Louis MacNeice: The
Classical Radio Plays, ed. Amanda Wrigley and S.J. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013), 20354.

Like a long-legged y upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.80
The word maps implies that this Caesar is Julius Caesar, extending the
Roman Empire into Gaul, but the use is similarly ambiguous to Mac-
Neices. Moreover, the word sink nds its answer in the deployment of
sunk in Ravenna:
What went wrong
With Byzantium as with Rome went slowly, their fame
Sunk in malarial marsh.
In Long-legged Fly, Yeats portrays events that will change the world as
beginning in a moment and in an individual; Julius Caesar averts the
sinking of civilization because of such a moment. In Ravenna, though,
things sink slowly. These mosaics do not provide us with the moment
when Byzantine culture reached its peak. Rather, the period when these
mosaics were made is revealed as one of religious and civil strife, with
Ravenna itself a complex product of earlier Roman inuences rather than a
purely Byzantine place.
This counters a position partly articulated in Long-legged Fly when
Michelangelo reclines on his scaffold in the Sistine Chapel. In Yeatss
poem great events are presented as almost equivalent to arts great achieve-
ments. The corollary to this is that works of art can provide a means of
reading history. This is the method of much of A Vision, which Gillis
describes as fundamentally a history of art, in which artworks provide the
means by which cultures can be understood and judged, and which also
provide the dynamics of social change.81 This methodology is openly
outlined in Yeatss introduction to the second version of A Vision, when he
notes the uncanny similarities between the rst version of the tract
(published in 1925) and Oswald Spenglers Decline of the West (rst
published in German in 1918, but only appearing in an English transla-
tion in 1926):
Both he and I had symbolized a difference between Greek and Roman
thought by comparing the blank or painted eyes of Greek statues with the
pierced eyeballs of the Roman statues, both had described as an illustration
of Roman character the naturalistic portrait heads screwed on to stock
bodies, both had found the same meaning in the round bird-like eyes of
Byzantine sculpture, though he or his translator preferred staring at innity
to my staring at miracle.82
80
81
82

Yeats forms a historical narrative from his experience of art, an aesthetic-
ally determined historiography, which underpins a cyclical conception of
history that guides his attitudes to the present. Ravenna undermines this.
As McDonald writes, it is one of several poems in The Burning Perch
where ghosts are both present and disconcertingly without apparent
meaning or intent for the present-tense observers, who seem to be merely
on the way to becoming ghosts themselves.83 The mosaics might knock
you at but the associations to be made with the ghosts of history are
partial and tentative.
In the Dove or Swan section of A Vision, Yeats conducts a whistle-stop
tour through the previous 4,000 years, but a passage considering Byzan-
tium opens with a complaint that history does not match the schema:
With a desire for simplicity of statement I would have preferred to nd in the
middle, not at the end, of the fth century Phase 12, for that was, so far as
the known evidence carries us, the moment when Byzantium became
Byzantine and substituted for formal Roman magnicence, with its glori-
cation of physical power, an architecture that suggests the Sacred City in the
Apocalypse of St. John.
Historys complications, though, do little to obscure Yeatss simplicity of
statement. A moment in time exists, so far as the known evidence carries
us, when something denite happens and a period changes character, in
this case the moment when Byzantium became Byzantine. Moreover,
this moment is embodied in a change of architectural style from which a
greater historical truth can be inferred. Yeats continues:
I think if I could be given a month of Antiquity and leave to spend it where
I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St.
Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato. I think I could nd in some little
wine-shop some philosophical worker in mosaic who could answer all my
questions, the supernatural descending nearer to him than to Plotinus even,
for the pride of his delicate skill would make what was an instrument of
power to princes and clerics, a murderous madness in the mob, show as a
lovely exible presence like that of a perfect human body.
I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded
history, religious, aesthetic and practical life were one, that architect and
articersthough not, it may be, poets, for language had been the instru-
ment of controversy and must have grown abstractspoke to the multitude
and the few alike. The painter, the mosaic worker, the worker in gold and
silver, the illuminator of sacred books, were almost impersonal, almost
83

perhaps without the consciousness of individual design, absorbed in their
subject-matter and that the vision of a whole people.84
Yeats places his ideal moment in history in the reign of Justinian, the same
period that MacNeice considers in Ravenna. It is presented as a moment
of unity of religious, aesthetic and practical life, in contrast to MacNeices
identication of religious and civic strife. Yeats infers this view of Byzan-
tium from a particular reading of the mosaics. MacNeices very point
seems to be that this kind of inference is impossible. Behind these mosaics
stand other historical events and inuences, such as earlier periods of
Roman historyconcentrated in that word Caesaror even the various
intrigues and machinations of Justinians court as recounted by Procopius.
MacNeices nal focus on his own cold eyes echoes back to Yeatss
recurrent reading of history in A Vision through their artistic representa-
tion, such as in this section on Byzantium, when he claims that: even the
drilled pupil of the eye, when the drill is in the hand of some Byzantine
worker in ivory, undergoes a somnambulist change. For Yeats the
sculpted eye is a means to infer much about the nature of Byzantine
civilization; but MacNeices own cold eyes belie, as in deny the truth of,
what the gold mosaics suggest about sixth-century Byzantium.
The churches and mosaics of Ravenna, rather than exemplifying a past
spiritual unity, are historically unpacked to reveal a less reassuring picture.
This is an implicit rebuttal to Yeatss idealization of Byzantium through a
reading of history based on cultural artefact. Yeats identies a past moment
of spiritual unity and portrays the ghosts of this moment as still present.
Therefore, transcendence, or at least the possibility of transcendence, is
somehow still available, despite the various disassociated difculties of the
modern world. As MacNeice implies, such historical methods are highly
suspect. The past is too complex to be straightforwardly apprehended and
idealized through aesthetic encounters with its remains.
Constant, which follows Ravenna in The Burning Perch, asserts on
visiting the city that was once Byzantium:
Too many curds on the meat, too many dark cloth caps
On the conveyor belt that twice a day
Spans the Golden Horn, too much history
Tilting, canting, crawling, rotting away,
Subsiding strata where ghosts like faults, like mites,
Reminders of stagnation or collapse,
Emerge into the mist.
84

There are layers of the past rotting away, emerging only as ghosts to
remind us that the governing principle of time is stagnation or collapse.
While history is shown to be far from ideal, the poem also explores the
allure of the contrary possibility: Caught between Roman and Turk a
dream takes shape | And Becomes Constant. Byzantium offers something
eternal, literally gured in the shortened name of Constant that MacNeice
gives. The poem juxtaposes the present citys red lamps and raki with a
vision of the citys history as ever-present:
the sky
Red with repeated res, accidental or designed,
Sags like a tent over riot and ruin and one
Who calmly, having other things in mind,
Bears on his palm the Church of the Holy Wisdom.85
This god- or saint-like gure has on his mind things other than the
repeated destruction of the city, as he holds an emblem of constancy
from the period between Roman and Turk, the Church of the Holy
Wisdom from Justinians reign. Having seemingly been random, the
poems end-rhymes come into focus in an alternate abab pattern in
these nal four lines, with the rhyme between one and Wisdom faintly
echoing the repeated come/Byzantium cadence of Sailing to Byzan-
tium. Out of all this confusion, a moment of Yeatsian formal control
attends the appearance of this imposing remnant of Byzantium. A similar
moment of formal irony seems to occur in Ravenna in the nal emer-
gence of a couplet with the rhyme between cold and gold.86 However,
Constant does not straightforwardly endorse this somnambulant gures
dream, which it places among such past and present chaos. As Robyn
Marsack writes: Constantinople bears witness to different kinds of
changelessness: a recurrently ruinous history [ . . . and] the enduring
image of Santa Sophia.87 The poem, like Ravenna and Budgie, is
complicating Yeatss sense of the availability of Byzantium as an eternal
spiritual realm or ideal past. It is a dream that is in danger of being
swamped by the rest of history, tilting, canting, crawling, rotting away,
despite Santa Sophias present presence. MacNeices poet is again left
alone, uncomforted, and unaided by the ghosts of the past, singing at
his post on the burning perch.
* * *
85 86
87
Robyn Marsack, The Cave of Making: The Poetry of Louis MacNeice (Oxford: Oxford

The engagements with Byzantium and Yeats in The Burning Perch might
be read in relation to what John McAuliffe views as the dening narrative
of twentieth-century Irish poetry: the coordinating and sometimes explo-
sive rebalancing of past and present.88 MacNeices awareness of the
antiquarian basis of post-Romantic constructions of Irish culture is clear
from the early 1930s on, for example in the rejection in Valediction of
the obligation to observe milestone and curio | The beaten buried gold of
an old kings bravado | Falsetto antiquities.89 The many attachments that
MacNeice interrogated in relation to the obligation to perform identity
within modern Irish poetry include the creation of a historical continuum
between past and present. His work also questioned the discovery of a
hope for the future in a salvaging of the ideal past. Considering a parallel
attachment, Gillis describes the treatment of location, including Ireland,
in late MacNeice as becoming intermeshed, transfused into a hallucin-
atory realm that clamours with uncanny clarity while offering less and less
to cling on to, such that the specicity of a particular place becomes of
questionable relevance.90 History and time in the later poetry are treated
similarly. No matter how denite, prosaic or concrete the present may
seem, it is subject to the sudden destabilization of uncanny shifts in the
future or past, as McDonald describes.91 The ability of history to provide
some kind of stable ground for constructing a coherent individual or
collective identity in the present, or to offer the possibility of a spiritually
or aesthetically redeemed future, becomes problematic.
MacNeice, though, is clearly challenging the use of an idealist sense of
history not directly in relation to the particular pressures of being an Irish
poet. Rather he is placing it in the midst of the general problems of existence
and the more temporally specic, though transnational, pressures of West-
ern modernity. As Terence Brown stresses, the alienation MacNeice
increasingly expressed not only had its sources in psychological, religious
and metaphysical anxieties, added to by the paradigm-shifting invention of
the atom bomb, but was also a response to the voracities of post-war
commerce and capitalism.92 MacNeice is therefore engaging with Yeats as
a poet who responds to the challenges of existence and modernity. Yeats is
88
John McAuliffe, Disturbing Irish Poetry: Kinsella and Clarke, 19511962, in Fran
Brearton and Alan Gillis, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), 22539: 226.
89
90
91
92
Terence Brown, MacNeice and the Puritan Tradition, in Kathleen Devine and Alan
J. Peacock, eds, Louis MacNeice and his Inuence (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1998),
2033: 2930.

being judged in relation to his attempts to confront the human situation
today (as MacNeice approvingly notes of William Golding in Varieties
of Parable).93
Certain aspects of Yeatss thought now seem impossible to sustain.
Those nal rhymes in Constant and Ravenna suggest, however, that
MacNeices late work still nds use, though dialectically, for the formal
resources of Yeatss poetry. As discussed in Chapter 2, the earlier sequence
The Coming of War explores the manner in which a reception of Yeats,
and the Literary Revival more generally, in nationalist bardic terms, does
not offer an escape from the imminent international war. Paradoxically,
though, this sequence nds a way to confront the wars arrival through
Yeatsian forms, such as the short line used in Dublin or the insistent
refrain of Galway.94 In Autumn Sequel (1954), as considered in
Chapter 4, misreading Yeats, in relation to Dylan Thomas, seems to
lead to a sense of form as a retreat from reality rather than a means to
respond to its challenges. A more productive response to Yeatss use of
form re-emerges, however, in MacNeices later poetry. In Longleys terms,
MacNeice starts again to receive Yeats dialectically and develop the
Yeatsian dialectic in using form to accommodate and admit estrangement
and ruination.95
More specically, MacNeice somewhat inhabits what he describes as
the peculiar genre of Yeatss late Crazy Jane type poems in his 1941
study. Somewhere between epigram and nursery rhyme, and character-
ized by their subtle music and their nervous imagery, these mechanical
songs appear most extensively in the Words for Music Perhaps section of
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933).96 MacNeice points to refrain
and repetition as key aspects of these poems manner. He argues that
refrain has been a taboo in twentieth-century poetry on the ground that
repetition saves thinking and can be facile, based on the false assump-
tion, which Yeats never made, that a complex, unmusical world
demandsin all casescomplex, unmusical poetry. Yeatss refrains are
unusual in offering the reader neither musical nor intellectual
simplication:
First, the music of his refrain is often less obvious or smooth than that of the
verses themselves, being somewhat at, sometimes halting, sometimes
strongly counterpointed. Secondly, his refrains tend to have either an
93 94
MacNeice, Varieties of Parable, 6. MacNeice, Collected Poems, 6806.
95
Edna Longley, It is time that I wrote my will: Anxieties of Inuence and
Succession, in Warwick Gould and Edna Longley, eds, Yeats Annual No. 12. That Accusing
Eye: Yeats and his Irish Readers (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 156.
96
MacNeice, Poetry of W.B. Yeats, 15860; Variorum Yeats, 50715.

intellectual meaning which is subtle and concentrated, or a symbolist or
nonsense meaning that hits the reader below the belt.97
Much of MacNeices description of the Crazy Jane type poems applies to
the peculiar genre of his own late work. As Longley writes:
An example of a MacNeicean refrain with a subtle and concentrated
intellectual meaning is the chorus in The Habits who reiterate that its
all for the best. An example of symbolist or nonsense meaning is crawly
crawly in The Introduction (which sends shivers down the spine) or tra-la
in The Taxis.98
While it may be partly true that, as Neil Corcoran somewhat overstates,
MacNeices own refrains never sound at all like Yeatss (a counterexample
being Galway), his refrains are clearly Yeats-like in the manner in which
they are not a substitute for thought but a part of its means.99 This is true
of MacNeices use of refrain in his poetry of the 1930s and 1940s as in his
late lyric returnsuch as in Autobiography from Plant and Phantom
(1941):
In my childhood trees were green
And there was plenty to be seen.
Come back early or never come.100
As Corcoran argues, The poems abject loneliness, which is presumably
the loneliness of its authors self-perception in this autobiography,
derives largely, though, from the way the refrain remains eerily detached
from the details being evoked.101 However, in The Burning Perch in
particular, refrain and repetition seem to be more prominent and varied
than before. In Dj Vu and Round the Corner repetition offers hope of
renewal, that Round the corner issooner or laterthe sea.102 In
Chteau Jackson it signies causation without determination:
That grew the owers that brewed the red
That stained the page that drowned the load
That built the house that Jack built?103
In The Taxis the nonsense repetend tra-la hits the reader below the
belt. Initially it seems to be a gesture of inconsequentiality: In the rst
97
MacNeice, Poetry of W.B. Yeats, 1645, 167.
98
99
Neil Corcoran, The Same Again? Repetition and Refrain in Louis MacNeice, The
Cambridge Quarterly 38.3 (September 2009), 21424: 223.
100
101
Corcoran, Repetition and Refrain in Louis MacNeice, 218.
102 103

taxi he was alone tra-la. By the ominous nal stanza, the menacing sense
emerges, as it seems to blank out an expletive, that this fragments lack of
meaning is getting in the way of the passenger knowing quite what is
befalling him:
As for the fourth taxi, he was alone
Tra-la when he hailed it but the cabby looked
Through him and said: I cant tra-la well take
So many people, not to speak of the dog.104
Longley suggests that Yeatss practice appealed to MacNeices Irish
roots.105 His use of refrain and repetition, though, suggests a more specic
reorientation of the Yeatsian aftermath in Irish poetry. Through being a
provocation for, rather than an escape from, thought, MacNeices own
mechanical songs unite singing and the struggles of the minds reection.
In doing so they return to the question recounted in his study of Yeats: An
Irish poet said to me lately Do poets of your school never sing? His
assumption was that a poet should sing rather than think.106 MacNeices
late poetrys insistent and frequently unsettling musicality rediscovers
Yeatss legacy to Irish poetry as one of thought and song, or rather thought
through song, falling into step with the sense of lyric outlined in the third
section of Donegal Triptych and in Varieties of Parable (as discussed in
Chapter 5).107 In MacNeices late work, form itself constructs a notion of
poetic musicality offering a mode of cognition. Despite MacNeices rejec-
tion of an idealist sense of form as a sign of arts supernatural supremacy in
the face of times inevitable destructions, the altogether more tentative
claims his poems make on the future rest, like Yeatss, on the ability of
poetic form not only to provide a forum for thought, but also a means for
his poems to keep on causing thought. Coda, a kind of curtailed villanelle
and the nal poem in The Burning Perch, in holding out hope for future
communion, articulates its thoughts through the subtle and concentrated
shifting inections of its questioning refrain:
Maybe we knew each other better
When the night was young and unrepeated
And the moon stood still over Jericho.
So much for the past; in the present
104 105
Ibid., 5834. Longley, Louis MacNeice, 166.
106
MacNeice, Poetry of W.B. Yeats, 159. The Irish poet was probably F.R. Higgins.
MacNeice seems to be paraphrasing their radio exchange, Tendencies in Modern Poetry, as
discussed in Chapter 2: Louis MacNeice and F.R. Higgins, Tendencies in Modern Poetry
(transcript), The Listener 22.550 (27 July 1939), 1856.
107
MacNeice, Collected Poems, 5001; MacNeice, Varieties of Parable, 14, 124.

There are moments caught between heart-beats
When maybe we know each other better.
But what is that clinking in the darkness?
Maybe we shall know each other better
When the tunnels meet beneath the mountain.108
108
Bibliography
ARCHIVE M ATERIA L
Individual items are outlined in the footnotes to the text. The archives drawn on were:
BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham Park, Reading.
Cuala Press Archive, Early Printed Books and Special Collections, Trinity College
Dublin.
E.R. Dodds Papers, Special Collections, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Irish Academy of Letters Papers, National Library of Ireland, Dublin.
John Boyd Collection, Theatre and Performing Arts Archive, Linen Hall Library,
Belfast.
John Hewitt Collection, Special Collections, University of Ulster, Coleraine.
John Hewitt Papers, The Public Record Ofce of Northern Ireland, Belfast.
Jon Stallworthy Papers, Special Collections, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Louis MacNeice Collection, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Columbia
University, New York.
Louis MacNeice Papers, Archive Centre, Kings College, Cambridge.
Louis MacNeice Papers, The Berg Collection, New York Public Library.
Louis MacNeice Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
Louis MacNeice Papers, The Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo, The State
University of New York.
Louis MacNeice Papers, Special Collections, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Oxford University Press Archive, Oxford.
Roy McFadden Papers, Special Collections, Queens University Belfast.
W.R. Rodgers Papers, The Public Record Ofce of Northern Ireland, Belfast.
W O RK S BY M A C N E I C E
C.M. Armitage and Neil Clarks A Bibliography of the Works of Louis MacNeice
(2nd edn, London: Kaye and Ward, 1974) is incomplete and unreliable. An
accurate and comprehensive bibliography of MacNeices shorter prose is
included in Alan Heusers edition of the Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). The fullest listing of MacNeices work for
radio is included in Louis MacNeice: The Classical Radio Plays, ed. Amanda
Wrigley and S.J. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Books
Auden, W.H., and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland (1937; rev. edn, London:
Faber and Faber, 1967).
MacNeice, Louis, Blind Fireworks (London: Gollancz, 1929).
MacNeice, Louis, Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1935).
MacNeice, Louis, Out of the Picture (London: Faber and Faber, 1937).
190 Bibliography
MacNeice, Louis, The Earth Compels (London: Faber and Faber, 1938).
MacNeice, Louis, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (London: Oxford University
Press, 1938).
MacNeice, Louis, Zoo (London: Michael Joseph, 1938).
MacNeice, Louis, The Last Ditch (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1940).
MacNeice, Louis, Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1940).
MacNeice, Louis, Plant and Phantom (London: Faber and Faber, 1941).
MacNeice, Louis, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (London: Oxford University Press,
1941).
MacNeice, Louis, Springboard (London: Faber and Faber, 1944).
MacNeice, Louis, The Dark Tower and Other Radio Scripts (London: Faber and
Faber, 1947).
MacNeice, Louis, Holes in the Sky (London: Faber and Faber, 1948).
MacNeice, Louis, Collected Poems, 19251948 (London: Faber and Faber, 1949).
MacNeice, Louis, Ten Burnt Offerings (London: Faber and Faber, 1952).
MacNeice, Louis, Autumn Sequel (London: Faber and Faber, 1954).
MacNeice, Louis, Visitations (London: Faber and Faber, 1957).
MacNeice, Louis, Solstices (London: Faber and Faber, 1961).
MacNeice, Louis, The Burning Perch (London: Faber and Faber, 1963).
MacNeice, Louis, Astrology (London: Aldus Books, 1964).
MacNeice, Louis, The Mad Islands and The Administrator: Two Radio Plays
(London: Faber and Faber, 1964).
MacNeice, Louis, trans., The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1936; London: Faber and
Faber, 1967).
MacNeice, Louis, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats, foreword by Richard Ellmann
(London: Faber and Faber, 1967).
MacNeice, Louis, The Strings are False: An Unnished Autobiography (1965;
London: Faber and Faber, 1982).
MacNeice, Louis, Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
MacNeice, Louis, Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1990).
MacNeice, Louis, Selected Plays of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser and Peter
McDonald (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
MacNeice, Louis, Autumn Journal (1939; London: Faber and Faber, 1998).
MacNeice, Louis, Collected Poems, ed. Peter McDonald (London: Faber and
Faber, 2007).
MacNeice, Louis, I Crossed the Minch, intr. Tom Herron (1938; Edinburgh:
Polygon, 2007).
MacNeice, Louis, Varieties of Parable (1965; London: Faber and Faber, 2008).
MacNeice, Louis, Letters of Louis MacNeice, ed. Jonathan Allison (London: Faber
and Faber, 2010).
MacNeice, Louis, Louis MacNeice: The Classical Radio Plays, ed. Amanda Wrigley
and S.J. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Malone, Louis [Louis MacNeice], Roundabout Way (London: Putnam, 1932).
Bibliography 191
Contributions to Books and Periodicals

MacNeice, Louis, Valediction: An Eclogue, Life and Letters 10.54 (June 1934),
3524.
MacNeice, Louis, Poetry To-Day (1935), in Geoffrey Grigson, ed., The Arts
To-Day (London: John Lane, 1935), repr. in Selected Literary Criticism of Louis
MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 1044: 15.
MacNeice, Louis, Some Notes on Mr. Yeatss Plays, New Verse 18 (December
1935), 79.
MacNeice, Louis, The Newest Yeats (review of W.B. Yeats, A Full Moon in
March), New Verse 19 (FebruaryMarch 1936), repr. in Selected Literary Criti-
cism of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 445.
MacNeice, Louis, review of W.B. Yeats, Dramatis Personae, Criterion 16.62
(October 1936), 1202.
MacNeice, Louis, Stephen MacKenna: A Writer who had the Courage of his
Instincts (review of Journal and Letters of Stephen MacKenna), Morning Post
(4 December 1936), 19.
MacNeice, Louis, Scottish Poetry (review of Hugh MacDiarmid, ed., A Golden
Treasury of Scottish Poetry), The New Statesman and Nation 21.517 (18 January
1941), 66.
MacNeice, Louis, The Way We Live Now, Penguin New Writing 5 (April 1941),
repr. in Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1990).
MacNeice, Louis, Northern Ireland and her People (c. 1944), in Selected Prose of
Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990),
14353.
MacNeice, Louis, The Godfather, Lagan 4 (1946), 19.
MacNeice, Louis, English Poetry Today, The Listener 40.1023 (2 September
1948), 3467.
MacNeice, Louis, Great Riches (review of Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats), The
Observer 8308 (27 August 1950), repr. in Selected Literary Criticism of Louis
MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 1713.
MacNeice, Louis, India at First Sight, in Laurence Gilliam, ed., BBC Features
(London: BBC, 1950), repr. in Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan
Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 16370.
MacNeice, Louis, About Ireland (review of Maurice Craig, Dublin, Charles
McDuff, Ireland and the Irish, Geoffrey Taylor, The Emerald Isle, Denis
OD. Hanna, The Face of Ulster, and Richard Hayward, Connacht: Galway),
The New Statesman and Nation 43.1106 (17 May 1952), repr. in Selected
Prose of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990),
1715.
MacNeice, Louis, The Other Island (review of Honor Tracy, Mind You, Ive Said
Nothing!, and Chiang Yee, The Silent Traveller in Dublin), The New Statesman
and Nation 46.1187 (7 November 1953), repr. in Selected Prose of Louis
MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 18993.
192 Bibliography
MacNeice, Louis, Dylan Thomas: Memories and Appreciations, Encounter 2.1
( January 1954), 1213.
MacNeice, Louis, note on Autumn Sequel, canto XVIII, London Magazine 1.1
(February 1954), 104.
MacNeice, Louis, The People of the Sea by David Thomson (review), London
Magazine 1.9 (October 1954), repr. in Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, ed.
Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 198200.
MacNeice, Louis, Authors Foreword: The Battle of Clontarf , Radio Times
145.1882 (4 December 1959), repr. in Selected Plays of Louis MacNeice, ed.
Alan Heuser and Peter McDonald (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 2634.
MacNeice, Louis, Being Simple (review of J.M. Cohen, Poetry of this Age: 1908
to 1958), The Spectator 204.6868 (12 February 1960), 2256.
MacNeice, Louis, Cest la terre (review of Angus MacLellan, The Furrow
Behind Me, Michael MacGowan, The Hard Road to Klondike, and Kate
OBrien, My Ireland ), The New Statesman 63.1632 (22 June 1962), repr.
in Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1990), 2435.
MacNeice, Louis, Under the Sugar Loaf , The New Statesman 63.1633 (29 June
1962), repr. in Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford:
MacNeice, Louis, The Two Faces of Ireland (review of Brendan Behan, Brendan
Behans Island, and Brian Inglis, West Briton), The Observer 8935 (30 Septem-
ber 1962), repr. in Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford:
MacNeice, Louis, Yeats at Work (review of Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines)
The Listener 69.1773 (21 March 1963), repr. in Selected Literary Criticism of
Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 23941.
MacNeice, Louis, The Ould Opinioneer (review of Sean OCasey, Under a
Coloured Cap), The New Statesman 65.1677 (3 May 1963), 6789.
MacNeice, Louis, Louis MacNeice Writes . . . (on The Burning Perch), Poetry
Book Society Bulletin 38 (September 1963), repr. in Selected Literary Criticism
of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987),
2478.
MacNeice, Louis, and F.R. Higgins, Tendencies in Modern Poetry (transcript),
The Listener 22.550 (27 July 1939), 1856.
WO R K S BY O TH ER S
Allen, Nicholas, Modernism, Ireland and Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009).
[Anon.], review of Louis MacNeice, The Last Ditch, The Dublin Magazine 15.4
(OctoberDecember 1940), 801.
[Anon.], review of W.R. Rodgers, Awake! and Other Poems, Times Literary
Supplement 2069 (27 September 1941), 487.
[Anon.], The Life of a Country Doctor, The Bell 3.1 (October 1941), 1927.
Bibliography 193
Arkins, Brian, Builders of My Soul: Greek and Roman Themes in Yeats (Gerrards
Cross: Colin Smythe, 1990).
Auden, W.H., The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings
19271939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber: 1977).
Baker, Denys Val, Britain Discovers Herself (London: Christopher Johnson, 1950).
Ballin, Malcolm, Irish Periodical Culture, 19371972: Genre in Ireland, Wales,
and Scotland (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Bardon, Jonathan, A History of Ulster (new edn, Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2001).
Beckett, Samuel, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed.
Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983).
Belis, Andrew [Samuel Beckett], Recent Irish Poetry, The Bookman 86 (August
1934), repr. in Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic
Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983), 706.
Bell, Sam Hanna, Nesca A. Robb, and John Hewitt, eds, The Arts in Ulster:
A Symposium (London: Harrap, 1951).
Bery, Ashok, Cultural Translation and Postcolonial Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007).
Boucicault, Dion, The Wearing of the Green, repr. in Seamus Deane et al., eds
The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991),
II, 1089.
Boyd, John, Introduction, Lagan 1 (1943), 57.
Brannigan, John, Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture (Edinburgh: Edin-
burgh University Press, 2009).
Brearton, Fran, The Great War in Irish Poetry: W.B. Yeats to Michael Longley
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Brearton, Fran, and Alan Gillis, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry
Brearton, Fran, and Edna Longley, eds, Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his
Legacy (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2012).
Briggs, Asa, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, IV: Sounds and
Vision, (rev. edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Brown, Terence, Louis MacNeice: Sceptical Vision (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan,
1975).
Brown, Terence, Irelands Literature: Selected Essays (Mullingar: Lilliput Press,
1988).
Brown, Terence, MacNeices Irelands, MacNeices Islands, in Vincent Newey
and Ann Thompson, eds, Literature and Nationalism (Liverpool: Liverpool
Brown, Terence, MacNeice and the Puritan Tradition, in Kathleen Devine and
Alan J. Peacock, eds, Louis MacNeice and his Inuence (Gerrards Cross: Colin
Smythe, 1998), 2033.
Brown, Terence, Louis MacNeice and the Second World War, in Kathleen
Devine, ed., Modern Irish Writers and the Wars (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe,
1999), 16577.
Brown, Terence, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 19222002 (rev. edn,
London: Harper Perennial, 2004).
194 Bibliography
Brown, Terence, The Irish Dylan Thomas: Versions and Inuences, Irish Studies
Review 17.1 (2009), 4554.
Brown, Terence, What am I Doing Here?: Travel and MacNeice, in Fran
Brearton and Edna Longley, eds, Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his
Legacy (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2012), 7284.
Brown, Terence, and Alec Reid, eds, Time was Away: The World of Louis
MacNeice (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1974).
Browne, J.N., Poetry in Ulster, in Sam Hanna Bell, Nesca A. Robb, and John
Hewitt, eds, The Arts in Ulster: A Symposium (London: Harrap, 1951), 13150.
Browning, Robert, Justinian and Theodora (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1971).
Burns, Robert, The Letters of Robert Burns, II: 17901796, ed. J. De Lancey
Ferguson and G. Ross Roy, (2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).
Butler, Hubert, Envoy and Mr. Kavanagh, The Bell 17.6 (September 1951),
3241.
Byron, George Gordon (6th Baron Byron), The Complete Poetical Works of Lord
Byron, V: Don Juan, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
Calder, Angus, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991).
Carney, Michael, Britain in Pictures: A History and Bibliography (London: Werner
Shaw, 1995).
Carson, Niall, The Barbaric Note: Sen OFaolins Early Years at the BBC, Irish
University Review 43.2 (2013), 398413.
Castle, Gregory, Modernism and the Celtic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2001).
Cathcart, Rex, The Most Contrary Region: The BBC in Northern Ireland
19241984 (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1984).
Clark, Heather, Regional Roots: The BBC and Poetry in Northern Ireland,
19451955, ireIreland 38.12 (SpringSummer 2003), 87103.
Clark, Heather, The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 19621972 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006).
Clark, Heather, Leaving Barra, Leaving Inishmore: Islands in the Irish Protestant
Imagination, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 35.2 (Autumn 2009), 305.
Clarke, Austin, review of Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal, The Dublin Magazine
14.3 (JulySeptember 1939), 824.
Clarke, Austin, Poetry of W.B. Yeats: An Extremely Irascible Guide (review of
Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats), The Irish Times (15 March 1941), 5.
Clarke, Austin, Pilgrimage and Other Poems (London: Allen and Unwin, 1929).
Clarke, Austin, Auden and Others (incl. review of Louis MacNeice, Holes in the
Sky), The Irish Times (9 October 1948), 6.
Clarke, Austin, Poetry in Modern Ireland, illust. Louis Le Brocquy (Dublin:
Published for the Cultural Relations Committee of Ireland by Colm
O Lochlainn, 1951).
Clarke, Austin, W.B. Yeats, The Dublin Magazine 14.2 (AprilJune 1939), repr.
in Reviews and Essays of Austin Clarke, ed. Gregory A. Schirmer (Gerrards
Cross: Colin Smythe, 1995), 913.
Bibliography 195
Clarke, Austin, Irish Poetry To-Day, The Dublin Magazine 10.1 (January
March 1935), repr. in Reviews and Essays of Austin Clarke, ed. Gregory
A. Schirmer (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1995), 5662.
Clarke, Austin, review of Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats, The Dublin
Magazine 16.2 (AprilJune 1941), repr. in Reviews and Essays of Austin Clarke,
ed. Gregory A. Schirmer (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1995), 1718.
Clarke, Austin, Reviews and Essays of Austin Clarke, ed. Gregory A. Schirmer
(Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1995).
Clarke, Austin, Collected Poems, ed. R. Dardis Clarke, intr. Christopher Ricks
(Manchester: Carcanet, 2008).
Cleary, Joe, Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (Dublin:
Field Day Publications, 2006).
Cleary, Joe, and Claire Connolly, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish
Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Clyde, Tom, Irish Literary Magazines: An Outline History and Descriptive Bibliog-
raphy (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2003).
Clyde, Tom, A Stirring in the Dry Bones: John Hewitts Regionalism, in Gerald
Dawe and John Wilson Foster, eds, The Poets Place: Ulster Literature and
Society: Essays in Honour of John Hewitt, 19071987 (Belfast: Institute of
Irish Studies, 1991), 24958.
Coleridge, S.T., Biographica Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life
and Opinions, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, I (London: Routledge
and Keegan Paul, 1983).
Collins, Lucy, Editorial: Reading Irish Poetry Cultures, 19301970, Irish Uni-
versity Review 42.1 (Spring 2012), 15.
Corcoran, Neil, After Yeats and Joyce: Reading Modern Irish Literature (Oxford:
Corcoran, Neil, The Same Again? Repetition and Refrain in Louis MacNeice,
The Cambridge Quarterly 38.3 (2009), 21424.
Corkery, Daniel, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature: A Study (Cork: Cork University
Press, 1931).
Coughlan, Patricia, and Alex Davis, eds, Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the
1930s (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995).
Coughlan, Patricia, and Tina OToole, eds, Irish Literature: Feminist Perspectives
(Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2008).
Coulton, Barbara, Louis MacNeice in the BBC (London: Faber and Faber, 1980).
Craig, H.A.L., Poetry in Ambush: An Article on the Magazine Poetry of W.R.
Rodgers, The Bell 26.3 (December 1950), 2937.
Crawford, Robert, Scotlands Books: The Penguin History of Scottish Literature
(Penguin: London, 2007).
Cronin, Anthony, The Literary Pages of the Daily Press, The Bell 17.4 (July
1951), 511.
Cronin, Anthony, The Young Writer, The Bell 17.6 (September 1951), 712.
Cronin, Anthony, Poetry in Britain Today, The Bell 18.11 (Summer 1953),
58999.
196 Bibliography
Cronin, Anthony, Poems (London: Cresset Press, 1957).
Cronin, Anthony, The Life of Riley (London: Secker and Warburg, 1964).
Cronin, Mike, The Blueshirts and Irish Politics (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997).
Crosson, Sen, The Given Note: Traditional Music and Modern Irish Poetry
(Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008).
Crotty, Patrick, The Irish Renaissance, 18901940: Poetry in English, in Mar-
garet Kelleher and Philip OLeary, eds, The Cambridge History of Irish Literature,
II: 18902000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 50112.
Curley, Jon, Poets and Partitions: Confronting Communal Identities in Northern
Ireland (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2011).
DArcy, Kathy, Almost Forgotten Names: Irish Women Poets of the 1930s,
1940s and 1950s, in Patricia Coughlan and Tina OToole, eds, Irish Literature:
Feminist Perspectives (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2008), 99124.
Danson Brown, Richard, Neutrality and Commitment: MacNeice, Yeats, Ireland
and the Second World War, Journal of Modern Literature 28.3 (2005),
10929.
Danson Brown, Richard, Everymans Progresses: Louis MacNeices Dialogues
with Bunyan, in W.R. Owens, and Stuart Sim, eds, Reception, Appropriation,
Recollection: Bunyans Pilgrims Progress (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 14763.
Danson Brown, Richard, Louis MacNeice and the Poetry of the 1930s (Tavistock:
Northcote House, 2009).
Davin, Dan, Closing Times (London: Oxford University Press, 1975).
Dawe, Gerald, The Proper Word: Collected Criticism: Ireland, Poetry, Politics, ed.
Nicholas Allen (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 2007).
Dawe, Gerald, and John Wilson Foster, eds, The Poets Place: Ulster Literature and
Society: Essays in Honour of John Hewitt, 19071987 (Belfast: Institute of Irish
Studies, 1991).
Deane, Seamus, A Short History of Irish Literature (London: Hutchinson, 1986).
Deane, Seamus, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since
1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
Deane, Seamus, et al., eds, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 3 vols (Derry:
Field Day Publications, 1991).
Devine, Kathleen, ed., Modern Irish Writers and the Wars (Gerrards Cross: Colin
Smythe, 1999).
Devine, Kathleen, and Alan J. Peacock, eds, Louis MacNeice and his Inuence
(Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1998).
Dillon Redshaw, Thomas, ed., Well Dreams: Essays on John Montague (Omaha:
Creighton University Press, 2004).
Dodds, E.R., ed. and trans., Select Passages Illustrating Neoplatonism (London:
Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1923).
Dodds, E.R., The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature
and Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).
Dodds, E.R., Tradition and Personal Achievement in the Philosophy of Plotinus,
paper read at Third International Congress of Classical Studies, September 1959,
published in Journal of Roman Studies 50 (1960), repr. in E.R. Dodds, The
Bibliography 197
Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief
(Oxford: Clarendon Press 1973), 12639.
Dodds, E.R., Missing Persons: An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).
Donoghue, Denis, Yeats (rev. edn, Glasgow: Fontana, 1971).
Duff, David, and Catherine Jones, eds, Scotland, Ireland and the Romantic
Aesthetic (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007).
Duffy, Charles, George Sigerson, and Douglas Hyde, The Revival of Irish Litera-
ture and Other Addresses (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894).
Dunn, Charles W., Celtic, in W.K. Wimsatt, ed., Versication: Major Language
Types (New York: Modern Language Association, 1972), 13647.
Eliot, T.S., Notes Toward the Denition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1948).
Ellmann, Richard, The Man and his Masks (London: Macmillan, 1948).
Ellmann, Richard, Foreword, in Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats
(London: Faber and Faber, 1967), 911.
Fallon, Brian, An Age of Innocence: Irish Culture 19301960 (Dublin: Gill and
Macmillan, 1998).
Fallon, Padraic, Seeking, The Dublin Magazine 8.4 (OctoberDecember 1933), 3.
Fallon, Padraic, A Poets Journal and Other Writings, 19341974, ed. Brian Fallon
(Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2005).
Fanning, Bryan, The Quest for Modern Ireland: The Battle for Ideas, 19121986
(Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2008).
Farren, Robert, The First Exile: A Poem (London: Sheed and Ward, 1944).
Farren, Robert [also see under Roiberd Farachin], The Course of Irish Verse in
English (London: Sheed and Ward, 1948).
Ferriter, Diarmaid, The Transformation of Ireland: 19002000 (London: Prole
Books, 2004).
Fitzpatrick, David, I will acquire an attitude not yours: Was Frederick MacNeice
a Home Ruler, and Why does this Matter?, Field Day Review 4 (2008), 14055.
Fitzpatrick, David, Solitary and Wild: Frederick MacNeice and the Salvation of
Ireland (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2012).
Fitzpatrick, David, The Gardener and the Stable-Boy: Yeats, MacNeice, and the
Problems of Orangeism, The Review of English Studies 64.263 (February
2013), 12744.
Flint, F.S., Imagisme, Poetry 1.6 (March 1913), 198200.
Foster, R.F., W.B. Yeats: A Life, II: The Arch-Poet, 19151939 (Oxford: Oxford
Fryatt, Kit, Banyan riot of dialectic: Louis MacNeices India, in Tadhg Foley
and Maureen OConnor, eds, Ireland and India: Colonies, Culture and Empire,
(Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006), 14052.
Fryatt, Kit, Patrick Kavanaghs Potentialities , in Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis,
eds, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012), 18195.
Gardiner, David, Unsentimental Prophecy: John Montague and The Dolmen
Miscellany (1962), in Thomas Dillon Redshaw, ed., Well Dreams: Essays on
John Montague (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 2004), 6380.
198 Bibliography
Genet, Jacqueline, and Wynne Hellegouarch, eds, Studies on Louis MacNeice
(Caen: Centre de publications de lUniversit de Caen, 1988).
Gillis, Alan, Irish Poetry of the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Gillis, Alan, Any Dark Saying: Louis MacNeice in the Nineteen Fifties, Irish
University Review 42.1 (2012), 10523.
Gogarty, Oliver St John, Elbow Room (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1939).
Goodby, John, Irish Poetry since 1950: From Stillness into History (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2000).
Goodby, John, In Blinking Blankness: The Last Poems, in Stan Smith, ed.,
Patrick Kavanagh (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009), 14562.
Goodby, John, The Later Poetry and its Critical Reception, in Stan Smith, ed.,
Patrick Kavanagh (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009), 12144.
Gould, Warwick, and Edna Longley, eds, Yeats Annual 12. That Accusing Eye:
Yeats and his Irish Readers (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996).
Greacen, Robert, ed., Northern Harvest: Anthology of Ulster Writing (Belfast:
Derrick MacCord, 1944).
Greacen, Robert, The Ulster Quality in Louis MacNeice, Poetry Ireland 8
(January 1950), Ulster Issue, ed. David Marcus, 1518.
Greacen, Robert, and Valentin Iremonger, eds, Contemporary Irish Poetry (Lon-
don: Faber and Faber, 1949).
Gregory, Lady, Coole (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1931).
Gwynn, Stephen, ed., Scattering Branches: Tributes to the Memory of W.B. Yeats
(London: Macmillan, 1940).
Harrisson, Tom, Ulster Outlooks, The Cornhill Magazine 962 (May 1944),
8091.
Heaney, Seamus, The Poetry of Richard Murphy, Irish University Review 7.1
(Spring 1977), 1830.
Heathcote, David, A Shell Eye on England: The Shell County Guides 19341984
(Faringdon: Libri, 2011).
Hemans, Felicia Dorothea, Poetical Works of Felicia Dorothea Hemans (London:
Henn, T.R., The Lonely Tower: Studies in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats (London:
Methuen, 1950).
Hewison, Robert, Culture and Consensus: England, Art and Politics since 1940 (rev.
edn, London: Methuen, 1997).
Hewitt, John, Townland of Peace, The Bell 9.1 (October 1944), 1012.
Hewitt, John, Freehold, Lagan 4 (1946), 2344.
Hewitt, John, Poetry and Ulster: A Survey, Poetry Ireland 8 (January 1950), 310.
Hewitt, John, Collected Poems 19321967 (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968).
Hewitt, John, Ancestral Voices: The Selected Prose of John Hewitt, ed. Tom Clyde
(Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1987).
Hewitt, John, The Collected Poems of John Hewitt, ed. Frank Ormsby (Belfast:
Blackstaff Press, 1991).
Hewitt, John, A North Light: Twenty-Five Years in a Municipal Art Gallery, ed. Frank
Ferguson and Kathryn White (c. 19614; Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013).
Bibliography 199
Higgins, F.R., Island Blood (London: John Lane, 1925).
Higgins, F.R., The Dark Breed: A Book of Poems (London: Macmillan, 1927).
Higgins, F.R., Yeats as Irish Poet, in Stephen Gwynn, ed., Scattering Branches:
Tributes to the Memory of W.B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1940), 14555.
Higgins, F.R., and W.B. Yeats, Anglo-Irish Ballads, in Broadsides: A Collection of
Old and New Songs (1935), repr. in Prefaces and Introductions: Uncollected Prefaces
and Introductions by Yeats to Works by Other Authors and to Anthologies Edited by
Yeats, ed. William H. ODonnell (Macmillan: Basingstoke, 1988), 1759.
Hollander, John, Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1988).
Hyde, Douglas, The Necessity of De-Anglicising Ireland (1892), repr. in Charles
Duffy, George Sigerson, and Douglas Hyde, The Revival of Irish Literature and
Other Addresses (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894), 11561.
Ireland, Denis, Smoke Clouds in the Lagan Valley, Lagan 2 (1944), 2536.
Iremonger, Valentin, Wrap Up My Green Jacket, broadcast on BBC Home
Service, 3 February 1947, printed in The Bell 14.4 (July 1947), 329.
Iremonger, Valentin, review of Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems 19251948,
Envoy 1.1 (December 1949), 7884.
Iremonger, Valentin, contribution to The Young Writer Symposium, The Bell
17.7 (October 1951), 1218.
Johnston, Dillon, Irish Poetry after Joyce (Mountrath: Dolmen Press, 1985).
Johnston, Dillon, Like Snow Off a Rope: Montagues Publishers and his
British Readership in the Sixties, in Thomas Dillon Redshaw, ed., Well
Dreams: Essays on John Montague (Omaha: Creighton University Press,
2004), 4662.
Johnston, Dillon, and Guinn Batten, Contemporary Poetry in English,
19402000, in Margaret Kelleher and Philip OLeary, eds, The Cambridge
History of Irish Literature, II: 18902000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), 357420.
Jones, Neil, Remaking It New: The Reorientation of Modernist Poetics in the
Early Poetry of Louis MacNeice, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2006.
Kavanagh, Patrick, Listen, Ireland To-Day 1.5 (October 1936), 61.
Kavanagh, Patrick, Jim Larkin, 13.6 The Bell (March 1947), 4.
Kavanagh, Patrick, Diary, Envoy 2.7 (June 1950), 8391.
Kavanagh, Patrick, Diary, Envoy 4.13 (December 1950), 8590.
Kavanagh, Patrick, Foreword, Envoy 3.9 (August 1950), 57.
Kavanagh, Patrick, Testament, Envoy 3.10 (September 1950), 856.
Kavanagh, Patrick, A Poets Country: Selected Prose, ed. Antoinette Quinn (Dublin:
Lilliput Press, 2003).
Kavanagh, Patrick, Collected Poems, ed. Antoinette Quinn (London: Allen Lane,
2004).
Kelleher, Margaret, and Philip OLeary, eds, The Cambridge History of Irish
Literature, II: 18902000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Kelly, Jim, ed., Ireland and Romanticism: Public, Nations and Scenes of Cultural
Production (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
200 Bibliography
Kelly, John S., A W.B. Yeats Chronology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003).
Kendall, Tim, ed., The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry (Oxford:
Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer, Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland,
19682008 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008).
Kerrigan, John, Louis MacNeice among the Islands, in Peter Mackay, Edna
Longley, and Fran Brearton, eds, Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), 5886.
Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London:
Vintage, 1996).
Kiberd, Declan, Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice, in Irish Classics (London:
Granta, 2000), 54355.
Kiberd, Declan, Irish Classics (London: Granta, 2000).
Kinsella, Thomas, Downstream (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1962).
Kinsella, Thomas, Prose Occasions: 19512006, ed. Andrew Fitzsimons (Man-
chester: Carcanet, 2009).
Kirkland, Richard, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965 (London:
Longman, 1996).
Kirkland, Richard, The Poetics of Partition: Poetry and Northern Ireland in the
1940s, in Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish
Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 21024.
Lee, J.J., Ireland 19121985: Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1989).
Leerssen, Joep, Mere Irish and For-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its
Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century (2nd edn,
Cork: Cork University Press, 1996).
Lloyd, David, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment
(Dublin: Lilliput, 1993).
Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, Dodds, Eric Robertson (18931979), Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Longley, Edna, Louis MacNeice: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber,
1988).
Longley, Edna, Progressive Bookmen: Left-wing Politics and Ulster Protestant
Writers, in The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle:
Bloodaxe Books, 1994), 10729.
Longley, Edna, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (New-
castle: Bloodaxe, 1994).
Longley, Edna, It is time that I wrote my will: Anxieties of Inuence and
Succession, in Warwick Gould and Edna Longley, eds, Yeats Annual 12. That
Accusing Eye: Yeats and his Irish Readers (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 11762.
Longley, Edna, Poetry and Posterity (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2000).
Longley, Edna, Yeats and Modern Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013).
Bibliography 201
McAuliffe, John, Disturbing Irish Poetry: Kinsella and Clarke, 19511962, in
Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 22539.
McCormack, W.J., Austin Clarke: The Poet as Scapegoat of Modernism, in
Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis, eds, Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the
1930s (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), 75102.
MacDonagh, Donagh, Veterans and Other Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1941).
MacDonagh, Donagh, and Lennox Robinson, eds, The Oxford Book of Irish Verse:
XVIIth CenturyXXth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958).
MacDonagh, Thomas, Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish (Dublin:
Talbot Press, 1916).
McDonald, Peter, Louis MacNeice: The Poet in his Contexts (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1991).
McDonald, Peter, Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1997).
McDonald, Peter, Louis MacNeice: The Burning Perch, in Neil Roberts, ed., A
Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 4919.
McDonald, Peter, Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (Oxford:
McDonald, Peter, Louis MacNeices War, in Tim Kendall, ed., The Oxford Handbook
of British and Irish War Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 37797.
McDonald, Peter, This mirror of wet sand: Louis MacNeices Achill Poems,
Agenda 43.23 (2008), 4657.
McFadden, Roy, The Pattern, Lagan 1 (1943), 69.
McFadden, Roy, A Note on Contemporary Ulster Writing, The Northman 14.2
(Winter 1946), 205.
McFadden, Roy, Forrest Reid, The Bell 13.6 (March 1947), 31.
McFadden, Roy, An Aged Writer, The Bell 12.4 (July 1947), 282.
McFadden, Roy, review of Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems 19251948, Rann 7
(Winter 19491950), 1012.
McFadden, Roy, Corrigibly Plural (review of Jon Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice),
Fortnight: An Independent Review of Politics and Arts 337 (March 1995), 412.
McFadden, Roy, Collected Poems 19431965, intr. Philip Hobsbaum (Belfast:
Lagan Press, 1996).
McFadden, Roy, and Geoffrey Taylor, Poetry in Ireland: A Discussion, The Bell
6.4 (July 1943), 4336.
McIntosh, Gillian, The Force of Culture: Unionist Identities in Twentieth-Century
Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999).
Mackay, Peter, Edna Longley, and Fran Brearton, eds, Modern Irish and Scottish
Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
MacKenna, Stephen, Journal and Letters of Stephen MacKenna, ed. with memoir
by E.R. Dodds, preface by Padraic Colum (London: Constable, 1936).
McKinnon, William T., Apollos Blended Dream: A Study of the Poetry of Louis
MacNeice (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).
202 Bibliography
McLane, Maureen N., Balladering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic
Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
MacNeice, Hedli, The Story of the House that Louis Built, in Jacqueline Genet
and Wynne Hellegouarch, eds, Studies on Louis MacNeice (Caen: Centre de
publications de lUniversit de Caen, 1988), 910.
McRedmond, Louis, ed., Written on the Wind: Personal Memories of Irish Radio
(Dublin: Radio Telefs ireann, 1976).
Mahon, Derek, MacNeice in England and Ireland, in Terence Brown and Alec
Reid, eds, Time Was Away: The World of Louis MacNeice (Dublin: Dolmen
Press, 1974), 11322.
Mango, Cyril, Byzantium and its Image: History and Culture of the Byzantine
Empire and its Heritage (London: Variorum Reprints, 1984).
Marcus, Laura, and Peter Nicholls, eds, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-
Century English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Marsack, Robyn, The Cave of Making: The Poetry of Louis MacNeice (Oxford:
Mathias, Roland, Anglo-Welsh Literature: An Illustrated History (Bridgend: Poetry
Wales Press, 1986).
Matthews, Kelly, The Bell Magazine and the Representation of Irish Identity
(Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012).
Matthews, Steven, Yeats as Precursor: Readings in Irish, British and American Poetry
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).
Maxwell, Glyn, Turn and Turn Against: The Case of Autumn Journal , in Fran
Brearton and Edna Longley, eds, Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his
Legacy (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2012), 17189.
Montague, John, Despair and Delight, in Terence Brown and Alec Reid, eds,
Time was Away: The World of Louis MacNeice (Dublin: Dolmen, 1974),
1237.
Montague, John, Forms of Exile (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1958).
Montague, John, Isolation and Cunning: Recent Irish Verse, Poetry 94.4 (July
1959), 26470.
Montague, John, Poisoned Lands and Other Poems (London: MacGibbon and Kee,
1961).
Montague, John, The Figure in the Cave and Other Essays, ed. Antoinette Quinn
(Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1989).
Montague, John, Company: A Chosen Life (London: Duckworth, 2001).
Montague, John, and Thomas Kinsella (poetry), eds, The Dolmen Miscellany of
Irish Writing (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1962).
Moorhead, John, Justinian (London: Longman, 1994).
Morin, Emilie, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009).
Morin, Emilie, Samuel Beckett, the Wordless Song and the Pitfalls of Memor-
ialisation, Irish Studies Review 19.2 (May 2011), 185205.
Muldoon, Paul, ed., Faber Book of Contemporary Poetry (London: Faber and
Faber, 1986).
Bibliography 203
Mumford, Lewis, The Culture of Cities (1938; London: Secker and Warburg,
1940).
Murphy, Richard, The Archaeology of Love (Dublin: Dolmen Press, c. 1955).
Murphy, Richard, Sailing to an Island (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1955).
Murphy, Richard, The Woman of the House: An Elegy (Dublin: Dolmen Press,
1959).
Murphy, Richard, The Kick: A Life Among Writers (London: Granta, 2002).
na gCopaleen, Myles [Brian ONolan], Baudelaire and Kavanagh, Envoy 3.12
(November 1950), 789.
Newey, Vincent, and Ann Thompson, eds, Literature and Nationalism (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 1991).
Nichevo, An Irishmans Diary, The Irish Times (6 September 1947), 7.
OBrien, Conor Cruise, Irishness (review of Donagh MacDonagh and Lennox
Robinson, eds, The Oxford Book of Irish Verse), The New Statesman (January
1959), repr. in Writers and Politics (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), 87100.
OBrien, Conor Cruise, Our Wits About Us (review of Vivian Mercier, The Irish
Comic Tradition), The New Statesman (February 1963), repr. in Writers and
Politics (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), 1015.
OBrien, Conor Cruise, Writers and Politics (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965).
OBrien, Darcy, W.R. Rodgers (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1970).
OConnor, Frank, The Fountain of Magic (London: Macmillan, 1939).
OConnor, Honor, Forms of Exile: Poems and Satires, 19461958, in Thomas
Dillon Redshaw, ed., Well Dreams: Essays on John Montague (Omaha:
Creighton University Press, 2004), 2945.
ODonell, Donat [Conor Cruise OBrien], A Rider to the Verdict, The Bell 10.2
(May 1945), 165.
ODonoghue, Bernard, Poetry in Ireland, in Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly,
eds, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2005), 17389.
OFaolin, San, This is Your Magazine, The Bell 1.1 (October 1940), 9.
OFaolin, San, The Irish (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1947).
OFaolin, San, On Translating from the Irish, Poetry Ireland 4 (January 1949),
1417.
OFaolin, San, King of the Beggars: A Life of Daniel OConnell (1938; Dublin:
Allen Figgis, 1970).
Farachin, Roiberd [also see under Robert Farren], review of Louis MacNeice,
The Poetry of W.B. Yeats, The Bell 2.2 (May 1941), 935.
Farachin, Roiberd, Some Early Days in Radio, in Louis McRedmond, ed.,
Written on the Wind: Personal Memories of Irish Radio (Dublin: Radio Telefs
ireann, 1976), 2950.
OGrady, Standish, History of Ireland, I: The Heroic Period (London: Sampson,
Low, Searle, Marston and Rivington, 1878).
O Lochlainn, Colm, ed., Irish Street Ballads (London: Constable, 1939).
Ormsby, Frank, Introduction, in The Collected Poems of John Hewitt (Belfast:
Blackstaff Press, 1991).
204 Bibliography
Tuama, Sen, and Thomas Kinsella, An Duanaire 16001900: Poems of the
Dispossessed (Mountrath: Dolmen, 1981).
Owen, Wilfred, The Complete Poems and Fragments, ed. Jon Stallworthy, 2 vols
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1983).
Parrish, Stephen Maxeld, A Concordance to the Poems of W.B. Yeats, programmed
by James Allan Painter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963).
Paterson, Adrian, Words for Music Perhaps: W.B. Yeats and Musical Sense,
DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2007.
Paterson, Adrian, Drawing Breath: The Origins of Moores Irish Melodies, in Jim
Kelly, ed., Ireland and Romanticism: Public, Nations and Scenes of Cultural
Production (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 12540.
Paterson, Adrian, Synges Violin: Words and Music in Irish Culture, review of
Harry White, Music and the Irish Literary Imagination (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), Dublin Review of Books 13 (Spring 2010). <http://
www.drb.ie/more_details/100219/Synges_Violin.aspx> accessed 1 August
2012.
Pearse, Pdraic H., Three Lectures on Irish Topics (Dublin: M.H. Gill and Son,
1898).
Pearse, Pdraic H., The Singer and Other Plays (Dublin: Maunsel, 1918).
Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, rev. B.S. Page, foreword by
E.R. Dodds, introduction by Paul Henry (London: Faber and Faber, 1956).
Pound, Ezra, Collected Shorter Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1968).
Procopius, The Anecdota or Secret History, trans. H.B. Dowling (London:
Heinemann, 1935).
Quidnunc, An Irishmans Diary, The Irish Times (18 January 1950), 5.
Quigley, Mark, Empires Wake: Postcoloniality and the Politics of Modern Literary
Form (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).
Quinn, Antoinette, Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan,
2001).
Quinn, Antoinette, Introduction, in Patrick Kavanagh, A Poets Country: Selected
Prose (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2003), 922.
Quinn, Justin, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 19002000
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Rodgers, W.R., Awake! and Other Poems (London: Secker and Warburg,
1941).
Rodgers, W.R., Black North, The New Statesman and Nation 256 (20 November
1943), 3313.
Rodgers, W.R., Armagh: The City Set on a Hill, Lagan 4 (1946), 1318.
Rodgers, W.R., Song, The Bell 12.5 (August 1946), 373.
Rodgers, W.R., The Ulstermen and their Country (London: Longmans, Green and
Co., for the British Council, 1947).
Rodgers, W.R., Europa and the Bull and Other Poems (London: Secker and
Warburg, 1952).
Rodgers, W.R., Collected Poems, with introductory memoir by Dan Davin
(London: Oxford University Press, 1971).
Bibliography 205
Rodgers, W.R., ed., Irish Literary Portraits, intr. Conor Cruise OBrien (New
York: Taplinger, 1973).
Rodgers, W.R., The Return Room (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2010).
Rolleston, T.W., Sea Spray: Verse and Translations (Dublin: Maunsel, 1909).
Schirmer, Gregory A., Out of What Began: A History of Irish Poetry in English
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
Schirmer, Gregory A., A Richly Ambiguous Position: Re-viewing Poisoned
Lands, A Chosen Light, and Tides, in Thomas Dillon Redshaw, ed., Well Dreams:
Essays on John Montague (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 2004), 8194.
Schreibman, Susan, Irish Women Poets 19291959: Some Foremothers, Colby
Quarterly 37.4 (December 2001), 30926.
Schuchard, Ronald, The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts
Shakespeare, William, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael ONeill
Shepard, Graham, Tea-Tray in the Sky (London: Arthur Baker, 1934).
Shiach, Morag, Nation, Region, Place: Devolving Culture, in Laura Marcus and
Peter Nicholls, eds, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Lit-
erature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 52844.
Shovlin, Frank, The Irish Literary Periodical 19231958 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2003).
Skelton, Robin, Celt and Classicist: The Versecraft of Louis MacNeice, in
Terence Brown and Alec Reid, eds, Time was Away: The World of Louis
MacNeice (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1974), 4353.
Smith, Stan, ed., Patrick Kavanagh (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009).
Stallworthy, Jon, Between the Lines: W.B. Yeatss Poetry in the Making (Oxford:
Stallworthy, Jon, Louis MacNeice (London: Faber and Faber, 1995).
Taylor, Geoffrey, Two Poems of Landscape (Autumn Landscape and Landscape
from a Hill), The Bell 12.3 (June 1946), 1912.
Thacker, Andrew, Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).
Thomas, Dylan, Collected Poems (London: Dent, 1952).
Tolley, A.T., The Poetry of the Forties (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1985).
Ulster Protestant, An [W.R. Rodgers], Conversation Piece, The Bell 4.5 (August
1942), 30514.
[Unnamed], The Guinness Book of Poetry 1957/58 (London: Putnam, 1959).
Vendler, Helen, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Oxford: Oxford
Walker, Tom, MacNeices Byzantium: The Ghosts of Yeats and Eliot in The
Burning Perch, The Review of English Studies 62.257 (November 2011),
785804.
206 Bibliography
Welch, Robert, Yeats and MacNeice: A Night-Seminar with Francis Stuart, in
Kathleen Devine and Alan J. Peacock, eds, Louis MacNeice and his Inuence
(Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1998), 119.
White, Harry, The Keepers Recital: Music and Cultural History in Ireland,
17701970 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998).
White, Harry, Music and the Irish Literary Imagination (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2008).
Whitehead, Kate, The Third Programme: A Literary History (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1989).
Wills, Clair, That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland during the Second
World War (London: Faber and Faber, 2007).
Wills, Clair, A Parrots Lie: Autumn Sequel and the BBC, in Fran Brearton and
Edna Longley, eds, Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his Legacy (Man-
chester: Carcanet Press, 2012), 190203.
Wimsatt, W.K., ed., Versication: Major Language Types (New York: Modern
Language Association, 1972).
Wordsworth, William, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford Oxford
Wrigley, Amanda, and S.J. Harrison, eds, Louis MacNeice: The Classical Radio
Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Yeats, W.B., Introduction, in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 18921935
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), vxlii.
Yeats, W.B., A Vision (2nd edn, London: Macmillan, 1937).
Yeats, W.B., Last Poems and Two Plays (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1939).
Yeats, W.B., The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and
Russell K. Alspach (London: Macmillan, 1957).
Yeats, W.B., Uncollected Prose, ed. John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson (London:
Macmillan, 1975).
Yeats, W.B., Prefaces and Introductions: Uncollected Prefaces and Introductions by
Yeats to Works by Other Authors and to Anthologies Edited by Yeats, ed. William
H. ODonnell (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988).
Yeats, W.B., Later Essays, ed. William H. ODonnell (New York: Scribners, 1994).
Yeats, W.B., Autobiographies, ed. William H. ODonnell and Douglas
N. Archibald (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).
Yeats, W.B., The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, (InterLex electronic edition,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Yeats, W.B., ed., The Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 18921935 (New York:
Yeats, W.B., F.R. Higgins, and (musical) Arthur Duff, eds, Broadsides:
A Collection of Old and New Songs (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1935).
Yeats, W.B., and Dorothy Wellesley, eds, Broadsides: A Collection of New Irish and
English Songs (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1937).
Index
Abbey Theatre 24, 49 blue see idealism

MacNeices submission of play to 545 Blueshirts 25, 28
Absolute Blue see idealism Blunden, Edmund 82
Achill Island 67, 68 Blunt, Anthony 24, 172
AE (George Russell) 35, 44, 116, 124 Botteghe Oscure (journal) 142
Allingham, William 44 Bowen, Elizabeth 120
antiquarianism 27, 32, 36, 41, 76, 97, Boyd, John 68, 79, 82
131, 184 Bradley, F.H. 173
Arkins, Brian 169 Brearton, Fran 6, 12, 74
Arnold, Matthew 44, 63 Brian Boru 149
atom bomb 68, 1625 Britain in Pictures 82
Auden, W.H. 7, 11, 19, 20, 39, 90, 138 British Council 112
compared with Yeats 37 Bront, Emily 135
describes Yeats as silly 170 Brown, Maurice 117
importance to MacNeice 94, 110 Brown, Terence 4, 16, 21, 23, 103, 107,
MacNeice gives pseudonym Egdon 102 125, 131, 132, 143, 184
Augustus Caesar 179 Browne, J.N. 79
Burke, Edmund 123
Baudelaire, Charles 133 Burns, Robert 97
BBC (British Broadcasting Butler, Hubert 132
Corporation) 45, 8, 137, 144 Byron, Lord 957
broadcast by MacNeice and Higgins 478 Byzantium 15888
launch of Third Programme 90
MacNeice and Rodgerss work in the Calder, Angus 81
Features Department 11420 Campbell, Joseph 44, 62, 63
MacNeice mentors Northern Irish Cape Town 1
writers for 678 Carrickfergus 67, 702, 156
MacNeice proposes programme on Castle, Gregory 78
Higgins 49 Catholic Church 147, 148
MacNeice sent to Indian Caudwell, Christopher 154
subcontinent 904 Celtic Twilight 52
in Northern Ireland 678, 823 character 109, 124, 148
regional broadcasting 823 and the BBC 11417
Beckett, J.C. 120 The Character of Ireland book
Beckett, Samuel 150 project 1204, 130, 139
Recent Irish Poetry 36 dangers of 1313, 1389
Behan, Brendan 130, 132 Higgins as 126
Belfast 4, 19, 412, 47, 545, 679 of Irish poetry and poets 3940, 77,
MacNeices characterization of 84, 147
Belfastmen 114 of the Irish people 114, 1301
Bell, The (periodical) 43, 65, 86, 87, 110, Kavanagh as 132
111, 118 mid-century literary fashion for 82, 130
MacNeice as poetry editor 4, 1079 of the Northern Irish people 11112, 114
Berkeley, George 52 Thomas as 125
Bery, Ashok 92 see also Irish identity; MacNeice, Louis:
Best, Richard 115 WORKS: Prologue to The
Betjeman, John 82 Character of Ireland; racial
Birmingham 21, 58, 171 character
Birmingham, University of 171 civil war 25, 33
208 Index
Clark, Eleanor 59 Daiken, Leslie 44
Clark, Heather 48, 75 Danson Brown, Richard 7, 35, 56, 58
Clarke, Austin 7, 35, 612, 1468, 149 Dante Alighieri 73
assessment of Yeats 456 Davidson, Robert 68
contributes to Irish Literary Davie, Donald: interest in Clarke 146
Portraits 116 Davies, Idris 81
criticisms of MacNeice 424, 867 Davin, Dan 120, 1212, 123, 124
explains assonance in Gaelic poetry 84 Davis, Thomas 44
inclusion in The Poetry of W.B. Yeats 44 Dawe, Gerald 123, 132
insults MacNeice 5 Day Lewis, C. 7, 37, 389, 115, 135
as poetic precursor 3 Deane, Seamus 131
on Radio ireann 137, 146 Delargy, J.H. 119
and song 153 Descartes, Ren 161
WORKS de Valera, Eamon 24, 42
Ancient Lights 146 Devlin, Denis 3, 7, 35
The Horse Eaters 146 Dickinson, R.E. 80
Irish Poetry To-Day 45, 146 Dillon, Jack 104
The Loss of Strength 152 Dodds, E.R. 1718, 19, 16972, 175
Marriage 1478 MacNeice gives pseudonym Boyce 102
Martha Blake 147 Dolmen Press 138, 142, 143
Pilgrimage and Other Poems 84 Donoghue, Denis 57, 146
Poetry in Modern Ireland 146 Dorset 70, 89, 156
Too Great a Vine 146 Dublin 5, 9, 1718, 19, 24, 26, 537, 83,
Clonmacnoise 612 11517, 122, 123, 124, 126, 133,
Clontarf, Battle of 119, 149 145, 149
Coffey, Brian 7 MacNeices alienation from 56
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 21, 161 MacNeices characterization of
Collins, Lucy 78, 148 Dubliners 114
colour see idealism MacNeices use of symbolism
Colum, Padraic 43, 44, 62, 63 regarding 567
Connolly, Cyril 4 MacNeices visit in 1939 545
Connolly, James 44 and Yeatss Easter 1916 567
Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness 91 see also MacNeice, Louis: WORKS:
contraceptives, ban on 147 Dublin, Train to Dublin
Corcoran, Neil 3, 11, 186 Dublin Lockout (1913) 109
Cork: OFaolins reminiscences of 11718 Dublin Magazine, The 35, 43, 61
Corkery, Daniel 35, 131
Coward, Noel 4 Easter Rising 44, 56, 1401
Craig, H.A.L. 11011, 115 see also Yeats, W.B.: WORKS: Easter 1916
Craig, Maurice 3, 115, 120 Eglinton, John 44
Craigavon, Viscount 41, 42 Eliot, T.S. 12, 37, 39, 80, 82, 101, 138
Crawford, Robert 81 compared to Yeats by MacNeice 160
Cronin, Anthony 129, 132, 1334, 148 as editor at Faber and Faber 55
as deputy editor of The Bell 136 Ellmann, Richard 12, 44
satirizes MacNeice and Rodgers 120 Emergency 75, 138, 140
Croppies Lie Down (song) 29 see also Second World War
Cruise OBrien, Conor 115, 1356 Emmet, Robert 117
Cuala Press 55 Empson, William 4
cultural nationalism Engels, Friedrich 45
English 812, 102 Envoy (periodical) 132, 133, 146
Irish 2936, 412, 80, 836 Evans, Estyn 120
Scottish 51, 95101
Welsh 51 Faber and Faber 5, 6, 356, 55, 119
Curley, Jon 3 Fallon, Padraic 312, 356, 115
Curran, Sarah 117 Farren, Robert (Roiberd Farachin)
Index 209
praises Higgins and Clarke 85 Herder, Johann Gottfried 30
produces Higgins/MacNeice Hewison, Robert 81
broadcast 49 Hewitt, John 53, 91, 115
review of The Poetry of W.B. Yeats 434 BBC broadcasts 7980, 82
satirized by Kavanagh 84 and The Character of Ireland book
views on Hewitt and Rodgers 856 project 120
views on MacNeice 86 friendship with Rodgers 110
WORKS inuenced by Mumford 80, 105
The Course of Irish Verse in English 85 introduces himself to MacNeice 4950
The Pets 12 and Lagan 68
Ferguson, Samuel 44 on MacNeices Englishness 878
Festival of Britain 79 and Metropolitan Man idea 88, 90
Fiacc, Padraic 3 and need for ancestors 712
Fianna Fil 245, 85 as poetic precursor 3
Fitzpatrick, David 289, 70 praised by Farren 856
Flower, Robin: translation of Pangur regionalism 51, 647, 714, 7980
Bn 12 role in progressive politics 4
folk song see song and rooted man idea 69, 74
Foster, R.F. 28 and Second World War 64
Fox, Charles James 123 We Irish 501
French, Percy: The Queens Afterdinner WORKS
Speech 12 The Bitter Gourd 69, 71
Fryatt, Kit 92, 93 Ireland 50, 523
Freehold (Townland of
Galway 54, 58 Peace) 656
Gardiner, David 136 Homestead 130
Garioch, Robert 81 Higgins, Aidan 138
Gate Theatre 24 Higgins, F.R. 5, 43, 44, 53, 138
Geddes, Patrick 80 in Autumn Sequel 1267, 129
Gentile, Giovanni 173 as character 126
Gibbon, Lewis Grassic 81 criticized by Kavanagh 84
Gilliam, Laurence 5, 67, 111 and Cuala Press 55
Gillis, Alan 78, 12, 43, 12930, 148, and Irish mode 61, 845
150, 1512, 154, 164, 180, 184 linked by MacNeice to Dylan
Gogarty, Oliver St John 55, 116 Thomas 1267
Golding, William 150, 185 MacNeice gives pseudonym Reilly 102
Goldsmith, Oliver 135 MacNeices proposal for radio feature
Gonne, Maud 44, 116 on 49, 119
Goodby, John 83, 91, 131, 147, 152 and The Poetry of W.B. Yeats 62, 63
Graham, W.S. 81 praised by Farren 85
Grattan, Henry 56 racial rhythm/bloodmusic 47, 62
Graves, Robert 135 radio broadcasts with MacNeice 479
Greacen, Robert 3, 6, 79, 88, 119 requirement for poets to sing 62, 187
Greece 90, 95, 967 in Rodgerss Irish Literary Portraits 116
Gregory, Lady 14, 43, 127 WORKS
translation of Pearses Mise ire 52 Broadsides 1314, 35, 62
Grigson, Geoffrey 13, 18, 37 The Dark Breed 84
Father and Son 12
Haley, William 83 Old Galway 60
Hanna Bell, Sam 4, 68, 82 A Plea 512
Harrisson, Tom 68 Hiroshima 68
Heaney, Seamus 3, 143 Home Rule 33
Hebrides 334 Hunter, Mercy (Mercy MacCann) 4,
Hemans, Felicia Dorothea 162 54, 110
Henn, T.R. 44 Hutchinson, Pearse 138
210 Index
Hyde, Douglas 43, 44 as poetic precursor 3
The Necessity of DeAnglicising and regionalism 834
Ireland 47, 139, 140 response to Rodgerss Irish Literary
Portraits 117
idealism (philosophical) 16776, 184 similarities to Dylan Thomas 132
Absolute Blue 153, 1678, 173, 174 struggles with characterhood 1324
MacNeices education in 173 WORKS
see also Neoplatonism; Platonism Auditors In 1445
identity see character; Irish identity; racial The Ballad of the Palace Bar 5
character The Gallivanting Poet 84
India 904 The Great Hunger 5, 83
Iowa, University of: Writers The Hired Boy 32
Workshop 139 The Hospital 145
Ireland, Denis 69 Jim Larkin 109
Ireland To-Day (periodical) 35 Kavanaghs Weekly 834, 133, 145
Iremonger, Valentin 6, 117, 136, 138 Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand
Irish constitution (1937) 41 Canal, Dublin 145
Irish Folklore Commission 119 Listen 32
Irish Free State 24, 41 Memory of Brother Michael 12
Irish identity 1304 The Paddiad 84
MacNeice on 113, 139 Prelude 144
performed on BBC 11420 Spraying the Potatoes 12
of poet 14, 17, 356, 39, 48, 848, 1379 Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer 6
poetic non-enactment of 1412, 1468 Kerrigan, John 345, 96, 98
as problem 36, 1356 Kiberd, Declan 93
Rodgers on 114, 11112 Kinsella, Thomas 8, 1379, 148
We Irish 503, 589 and Dolmen Press 138
see also character; racial character interest in Clarke 146
Irish language poetics see Irish mode MacNeice takes notice of 139
Irish Literary Revival see Literary Revival WORKS
Irish literary canon/culture 3, 356 Another September 137
Irish mode 323, 601, 623, 845, A Country Walk 152
1358, 1468, 154 New Oxford Book of Irish Verse 6
disturbance of 1489 Thinking of Mr. D 139
Irish Street Ballads 12, 10
Irish Times, The 43, 85, 11415 Lagan (miscellany) 66, 689, 79
landscape
Jeffrey, Francis 96, 100 in Northern Ireland 53, 705, 1504
Johannesburg 1 place v. space 17, 1512
Johnson, Lionel 44 poets relationship to 44, 53, 58
Johnston, Denis 45 soil 47, 71, 86, 88, 116, 145
The Moon in the Yellow River 24 stones 60, 69, 746
Johnston, Dillon 3 in west of Ireland 53, 58, 5960, 73,
Jordan, John 138 756, 778, 87, 98, 116, 140, 151,
Joyce, James 3, 116, 124 1556
Julius Caesar 17980 see also roots
Justinian 1779, 182, 183 Larkin, Jim 109
Larminie, William 44, 85
Kafka, Franz 150 Lee, J.J. 131
Kavanagh, Patrick 45, 7, 32, 115, 1446 Liddy, James 138
in The Bell 109 Lindsay, Maurice 81
contrasted with Montague 144 Listener (BBC magazine) 334, 47
criticisms of other poets 835 Literary Revival 3, 7, 15, 456, 51, 52, 78,
Envoy diary columns 132 131, 144, 146
and minstrelsy complex 32 Lloyd, David 30
Index 211
London 9, 45, 68, 91, 104, 105, 111, 120, childhood in Carrickfergus 702, 88
1323, 142, 164 critical reception in Ireland 423, 867
MacNeices feelings on 33, 645, 105 critical reception in Northern
Longley, Edna 4, 5, 1213, 23, 38, 39, 50, Ireland 878
51, 56, 645, 67, 74, 151, 156, and Cuala Press 55
185, 186, 187 develops Yeatsian dialectic 12, 40, 1858
Longley, Michael 3, 6 on Dublin v. Belfast 114
engagement with younger Irish
McAuliffe, John 138, 146, 148, 184 poets 139, 1413
MacCaig, Norman 81 and father 19, 41, 65, 712, 73, 74,
MacCann, George 54, 97, 110 8990
MacNeice gives pseudonym and regionalism 647, 69, 714, 8688
Maguire 102 gives Clark Lectures 150
MacCann, Mercy see Hunter, Mercy and idealism 16776
McCormack, W.J. 146 interest in Mumford 105
MacDiarmid, Hugh 81 on Irish character 114, 139
A Golden Treasury of Scottish Irish v. English MacNeice 7, 14, 17,
Poetry 989 868
MacDonagh, Donagh 55 meeting with Yeats 18, 170
The Oxford Book of Irish Verse 1, 6, misreading of Yeats 129, 185
1356 and mysticism 58, 104, 152, 1723,
MacDonagh, Thomas 30, 44, 60, 63, 1756
99, 154 notes on Irish Reading for lectures in
McDonald, Peter 20, 25, 53, 65, 67, 73, Cape Town 13
89, 114, 122, 124, 127, 139, 140, and nuclear apocalypse 155, 1625
141, 150, 155, 162, 166, 181, 184 place in Irish literary tradition 210, 14,
McFadden, Roy 115 27, 425, 868
and allegiance to place 79, 95 poetry editorship of The Bell 4, 1079
in The Bell 108 on politics in Northern
criticism of MacNeice 87, 95 Ireland 412, 113
on next generation after MacNeice 34 reading Yeats when young 18
WORKS and real England 104
Forrest Reid (An Aged Writer) 108 relationship with Higgins 479, 545
The Pattern 689 relationship with Rodgers 678,
McGahern, John 138 10911, 11920
Mac Giolla Phdraig, Brian 31 and roots 69, 712, 745, 8691,
McIntosh, Gillian 4, 112, 113 1556
MacKenna, Stephen 17, 171, 172 and Second World War 23, 54,
McKinnon, William T. 95, 1523, 645, 75
172, 173 and song 25, 336, 1534
McLane, Maureen 323, 47, 148 thinking v. singing 62, 187
McLaverty, Michael 115 trip to Ireland in 1939 535
MacLean, Sorley 81 trip to Ireland in 1945 678
McMahon, Bryan 115 trip to Indian subcontinent for
MacNamara, Brinsley 49, 115 BBC 904
MacNeice, Frederick 19, 41, 65, 712, 73, and Unity of Being 1736
74, 8990 use of refrain/repetition 578, 623, 99,
MacNeice, Hedli 91, 10910 174, 1858
MacNeice, Louis work for BBC Features
and ancestors 712 Department 11720, 124
asking questions 141, 144, 149 work for British Institute in Athens 90
and the ballad tradition 12, 1314, 35, Yeatss engagement with 1214, 3840
44, 59, 63, 96101 WORKS
brainwork 445, 46 Achill poems 6776, 95, 151
and character 10910, 1245, 1267 The Administrator (radio play) 163
212 Index
MacNeice, Louis (cont.) I Crossed the Minch 11, 33, 75, 78,
The Agamemnon of Aeschylus 11 89, 99, 103, 155
As In Their Time 163 India at First Sight (article) 92
Autobiography 186 India at First Sight (radio feature) 93
Autumn Journal 403, 98 Invocation 1746
Autumn Sequel 49, 89, 91, 1015, The Kingdom 65, 67, 90, 101, 154
12430, 140, 154, 158, 185 The Last Ditch 55
The Back-Again 155 Leaving Barra 11, 75
Bagpipe Music 345, 96, 99 The Left-Behind 155
Birmingham 58 Letter from India 91, 93
Blind Fireworks 11 Letters from Iceland 11
Budgie 1612, 16570, 173, The Libertine 124
176, 183 The Mad Islands (radio play) 164
The Burning Perch 158, 161, 162, Mahabalipuram 94
176, 181, 184, 186, 187 Modern Poetry 11, 38, 945, 161
Carrickfergus 70 Neutrality 75
Carrick Revisited 70 No More Sea 778, 89
The Casualty 172 Northern Ireland and her
The Character of Ireland book People 11213
project 1205, 130, 139 Ode 214
Chteau Jackson 186 On the Four Masters 149
Cock o the North 95101 The Once-in-Passing 156
Coda 1878 Out of the Picture (play) 11
Collected Poems, 19251948 87, 95 Plant and Phantom 186
Coming of War sequence 5564, Poems 11, 13
75, 185 Poetry To-day 15, 378
The Conscript 124 The Poetry of W.B. Yeats 1112, 19,
Constant 1823, 185 435, 578, 623, 152, 160, 166
The Dark Tower (radio play) 67 Prologue to The Character of
Death of a Prominent Ireland 121, 13941, 144, 146,
Businessman 18 148, 149
The Death of Lord Byron (radio Ravenna 17783, 185
feature) 96 The Road to Independence (radio
Dj Vu 186 feature) 92
Didymus 95 Roundabout Way 11
Donegal Triptych 1504, 156, Round the Corner 173, 186
1736, 187 Selva Oscura 173
Dublin 557, 185 Snow 1112
The Earth Compels 11, 37, 70 Soap Suds 175
Eclogue by a Five-Barred Solstices 149, 158
Gate 1920, 23 Some Notes on Mr. Yeatss
Eclogue for Christmas 3940 Plays 1819, 37
Eclogue from Iceland 172 Springboard 65, 67, 124
Faust (translation) 117 Station Bell (play) 245
Galway 58, 185, 186 The Strand 73, 89
The Godfather 69 The Strings are False 18, 54, 64, 164
The Gone-Tomorrow 155 The Stygian Banks 90
Greyness is All 163 Subject in Modern Poetry 378
The Habits 186 The Taxis 1867
A Hand of Snapshots 1546 Ten Burnt Offerings 89, 91,
The Hebrides 75 95101, 124
The Here-and-Never 156 They Met on Good Friday (radio
Holes in the Sky 67, 86, 8890, play) 119, 149
151, 158 This is the Life 162
House on a Cliff 156 Train to Dublin 1319, 23, 62, 151
Index 213
Under the Mountain 77 Auction 143
Valediction 257, 93, 140, 184 The Battle of Aughrim 143, 149
Varieties of Parable 150, 154, 163, Sailing to an Island 152
185, 187 Voyage to an Island (The
Visitations 150, 156, 164 Deserters) 1423
Visitations 165, 173 The Woman of the House 144
The Way We Live Now 64 mysticism 58, 104, 152, 159, 1723, 1756
Western Landscape 746, 87, 89,
93, 140 na gCopaleen, Myles see ONolan, Brian
The Window 90 Nash, Paul 81
Woods 8990, 101 nationalism see cultural nationalism
Zoo 11 Neoplatonism 16873, 1756
MacPherson, James 97 New Statesman and Nation 111
Madge, Charles 389 New Verse (magazine) 13, 19
Mahon, Derek 3, 6 Northern Ireland
Mallory, George 1034 literary culture of 34, 6, 689, 7980,
Mangan, James Clarence 44 823, 8788
Manning, Olivia 130 MacNeices 1945 visit to 678
Markievicz, Constance 44 MacNeices pamphlet on 11213
Marsack, Robyn 19, 93, 124, 156, 183 partition 25, 33, 412
Matthews, Kelly 107 politics in 412, 113
Matthews, Steven 1112 Rodgers on 11112
Mercier, Vivian 135 violence in 412, 113
Michelangelo 180 Northman, The (magazine) 79
Miller, Liam 138 nuclear fall out 1624, 176
modernism 3, 146, 151, 154 see also atom bomb
Monophysites 178
Montague, John 3, 115, 1367, 1389 OBrien, Darcy 53
contrasted with Kavanagh 144 OBrien, Kate 130
and Dolmen Press 138 OCasey, Sean: Under a Coloured Cap 163
interest in Clarke 146 OConnell, Daniel 56, 123, 131
MacNeice takes notice of 139 OConnor, Frank 45, 35, 44, 623, 100,
WORKS 115, 120, 130
Faber Book of Irish Verse 6 argument with OFaolin about Yeats 116
Irish Street Scene, with OConnor, Honor 141
Lovers 139, 141 Odysseus 95
Regionalism, or Portrait of the Artist ODonoghue, Bernard 2930
as a Model Farmer 137 ODuffy, Eoin 245
The Rough Field 149 OFaolin Sen 4, 35, 44, 86, 99100, 115
Moore, Brian 3, 138 argument with OConnor about
Moore, George 116 Yeats 116
Moore, Thomas 44, 100, 115 criticism of Irish mode 845
Morin, Emilie 30, 36, 101 Return to Cork (radio feature) 11718
Muir, Edwin 81, 150 works on Irish character 1301
Muir, Willa 81 Farachin, Roiberd see Farren, Robert
Muldoon, Paul 3, 6 OGrady, Standish: History of Ireland 140
Faber Book of Contemporary Irish O Lochlainn, Colm: Irish Street
Poetry 48 Ballads 12, 10
stance on the Troubles 48 OMalley, Ernie 54, 114, 119
Mumford, Lewis 80 MacNeice gives pseudonym Aiden 102
The Culture of Cities 105 ONolan, Brian (Myles na
Mure, Geoffrey 173 gCopaleen) 1323
Murphy, Michael 115 OSullivan, Seamus 44, 62
Murphy, Richard 138, 1424 Tuama, Sen 29
The Archaeology of Love 143 Ormsby, Frank 51
214 Index
Orwell, George 82 Rodgers, W.R.
Owen, Wilfred 61 in The Bell 108, 111
Oxford, University of 171, 173 criticized by Kavanagh 84
Oxford Book of Irish Verse, The (1958) 1356 decline 1224
MacNeices inclusion in 6, 135 on divisions in Northern
MacNeices notes from 12 Ireland 11112, 122
Oxford English Dictionary 162 on Irish character 114
Oxford University Press 120 and landscape 53
in Lagan 69
parable 33, 768, 1501 MacNeices relationship with 678,
Parsons, Clere 19 10911, 11920
Pater, Walter 45 MacNeice gives pseudonym
Paulin, Tom 3, 6 Gorman 102
Pearse, Patrick 301, 32, 44, 53 praised by Farren 856
Mise ire 52 friendship with Hewitt 110
Pinter, Harold 150 and regionalism/rootedness 856, 1213
Piper, John 81, 82 role in progressive politics 4
place 17, 1512 work at the BBC 68, 111, 11417
Plato 164, 168 work with MacNeice 115,
Platonism 16670 11920, 143
Plotinus 16870, 172, 1756 WORKS
Plunkett, James 138 Armagh 120
Poetry (periodical) 137 Awake! and Other Poems 110
Poetry Book Society Bulletin 158 The Bare Stones of Aran (radio
Pound, Ezra 154 feature) 11516
Procopius: Secret History 1778, 182 The Character of Ireland book
project 1205, 130
Quinn, Antoinette 84 City Set on a Hill (radio feature) 69, 111
Collected Poems 122
racial character Epilogue to The Character of
idea of racial rhythm or Ireland 1213
bloodmusic 478, 62, 135 Europa and the Bull and Other
Celtic 501, 63 Poems 111
Gaelic 52, 63, 84 Ireland 53, 112
Irish 1205, 1304 Irish Literary Portraits 11617
Saxon 63 The Irish Storyteller (radio feature)
see also character; Irish identity 116, 119
Radio ireann Lent 121
broadcasts by Clarke 137, 146 Lifes Circumnavigators 12
broadcast by MacNeice and Professional Portrait of a Country
Higgins 489 Parson (radio feature) 111
Radio Times 83, 118, 149 The Net 121
Rannaigecht Mr 60 Paired Lives 121
regionalism 7988 Song 108
English (Deep England) 812, 102 The Ulstermen and their Country 113
manifestoes for 65, 689, 7980 Rolleston, T.W. 44, 612
Scottish 81 Roman invasion, lack of in Ireland 139
Ulster 6474, 867 roots, geographical and cultural 79, 856,
Irish 7988 95, 117, 121, 123
Welsh 81 Hewitts idea of the rooted man 69,
Rhys, Keidrich 81 74, 90
Riding, Laura 39 MacNeice in relation to 69, 712,
Rilke, Rainer Maria 45 745, 8691, 1556
Roberts, Lynette 81 Russell, Bertrand 80
Robinson, Lennox 17, 24, 116
A Golden Treasury of Irish Verse 99 Sackville-West, Vita 82
The Oxford Book of Irish Verse 1, 6, 1356 Salkeld, Blanaid 35
Index 215
Schirmer, Gregory A. 144 Thacker, Andrew 17, 151
Scott, Walter 97 Theodora 1779
Scottish literature see cultural nationalism: Thomas (apostle) 95
Scottish Thomas, Dylan 9, 49, 81, 10910,
Second World War 23, 54, 645, 75 11920, 161
see also emergency in Autumn Sequel 12530, 158
Self, Peter 80 as character 125
selkie (ScottishIrish mythical linked by MacNeice to Ireland/
creature) 256 Yeats 12530, 185
Shakespeare, William 160 MacNeice gives pseudonym
Hamlet 147 Gwilym 102, 125
The Phoenix and the Turtle 153 similarities to Kavanagh 132
The Tempest 152 Thompson, Sam 4
Shaw, George Bernard 116 Thucydides 1045
John Bulls Other Ireland 923 Tiller, Terence 96
Shell County Guides 82 Times Literary Supplement, The 110
Shelley, Percy Bysshe: Mont Blanc 103 Todhunter, John 44
Shepard, Graham 172 Tolley, A.T. 83
Sheridan, Niall 35 Tomelty, Joseph 115
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 135 Tracy, Honor 130
Shiach, Morag 82 travel, as mode of composition in
Skelton, John: Speke Parrot 102 MacNeices work 16
Skelton, Robin 60 Trinity College Dublin 146
Smith, Sidney Goodsir 81 Tynan, Katherine 44
Society for Psychical Research 1712
song 14, 2836 Ulster Ofce 11213
Anglo-Irish ballad tradition 12, 10, Ulster regionalism see regionalism
1314, 44, 99100 Ussher, Arland 120, 130
Broadsides 1314, 35, 62
commercialization of 345 Val Baker, Denys 80
folk song 1314, 301 Vendler, Helen 1516
MacNeices engagement with 25, 336,
1534 Watkins, Vernon 81
minstrelsy complex 323, 35, 47, 148 Wearing of the Green (song) 25, 26
political use of 289 Weber, Richard 138
Scots ballad tradition 100 Welch, Robert 2, 7
and thought 62, 187 Wellesley, Dorothy 12
Yeatss use of 2830 White, Harry 31
space 17, 141, 1512, 154, 157 Wilde, Oscar 135
Spectator, The 142 Wills, Clair 75, 86, 101
Spender, Stephen 7, 19, 20, 37 Woolf, Virginia 82
Spengler, Oswald: Decline of the West 180 Wordsworth, William 33, 1523
Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie Queen 101
Stahl, Ernst 534 Yeats, Anne 116
Stallworthy, Jon 4, 19, 25, 37, 139 Yeats, George 55
MacNeices review of Between the Yeats, Elizabeth (Lolly) 55
Lines 1767 Yeats, Jack B. 54
Stephens, James 43, 110 Yeats, W.B.
Stewart, Andrew 82 compared to Eliot by MacNeice 160
Stewart, John D. 115 composition practices 14
Strong, L.A.G. 83 conception of history 15961, 176
Stuart, Iseult 116 conception of history as art
Synge, J.M. 43, 63, 11516, 123 history 1801
The Playboy of the Western World 131 disinclination towards the
mechanical 16
Tate Gallery 104 engagement with MacNeice 1214,
Taylor, Geoffrey 1078, 115, 130 3840
216 Index
Yeats, W.B. (cont.) Nineteen Hundred and
linked by MacNeice to Dylan Nineteen 1516, 52,
Thomas 12630, 185 153, 165
meeting with MacNeice 18, 170 The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 13,
and minstrelsy complex 32 389, 52, 99
as point of origin in Irish literary Parnells Funeral 147
history 3 Per Amica Silentia Lunae 15, 45
in Rodgerss Irish Literary A Prayer for my Daughter 212
Portraits 11617, 123 Remorse for Intemperate Speech 41
use of refrain/repetition 28, 57, 58, 62, Responsibilities 147
63, 1858 The Sad Shepherd 16
use of song 2830, 1858 Sailing to Byzantium 15, 16570,
use of sound 1516 1737, 183
and supremacy of art 1689, 187 The Second Coming 42
and Unity of Being 1736 September 1913 147
WORKS The Song of the Happy
The Ballad of a Foxhunter 18 Shepherd 16, 128
The Black Tower 165 The Spur 159
Blood and the Moon 153 The Statues 52
Broadsides 1314, 35, 62 The Stolen Child 18
Cathleen ni Houlihan 41 Ten Principal Upanishads 3940
The Choice 129 The Tower 153, 168
The Collected Poems of W.B. Three Marching Songs 278
Yeats 160 To Ireland in the Coming
Coole Park, 1929 1278 Times 52, 53
Crazy Jane poems 62, 1856 To a Wealthy Man who promised
Cuchulain Comforted 73 a Second Subscription to the
Dramatis Personae 37 Dublin Municipal Gallery if it
Easter 1916 20, 40, 52, 567 were proved the People wanted
A Full Moon in March 37 Pictures 147
The Gyres 159, 161 Under Ben Bulben 46, 77
The Lake Isle of Innisfree 154 A Vision 45, 159, 176, 180, 182
Lapis Lazuli 1112, 15962 The Wanderings of Oisin 74
Last Poems and Two Plays 55 The Wild Swans at Coole 58
Last Poems and Plays 159 The Winding Stair and Other
Long-legged Fly 17980 Poems 185
Meditations in Time of Civil Words for Music Perhaps 31, 185
War 40, 58, 153, 166 Young Ireland movement 28

Walker MacNeice and The Irish Poetry of His Time

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Walker MacNeice and The Irish Poetry of His Time

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

OUP CORRECTED PROOF FINAL, 14/8/2015, SPi

OXFORD ENGLISH MONOGRAPHS

Louis MacNeice and

In the summer of 1959, Louis MacNeice travelled to South Africa. He gave

2 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

4 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

6 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

8 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

10 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

My curse attend you, Sweeney, for you have me nearly robbed,

I wish the Queen of England would write to me in time,

It is easy to forget the extent to which Louis MacNeices career overlapped

12 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

14 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

16 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

18 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

20 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

22 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

24 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

26 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

28 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

30 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

32 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

34 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

36 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

38 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

40 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

42 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

44 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

128 129 130 131

46 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

On 11 July 1939, Louis MacNeice made an early foray into radio

48 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

Racial and Regional Rhythms 49

50 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

Racial and Regional Rhythms 51

52 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

Racial and Regional Rhythms 53

54 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

Racial and Regional Rhythms 55

56 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

Racial and Regional Rhythms 57

58 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

Racial and Regional Rhythms 59

60 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

Racial and Regional Rhythms 61

62 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

Racial and Regional Rhythms 63

64 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

Racial and Regional Rhythms 65

66 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

Racial and Regional Rhythms 67

68 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

Racial and Regional Rhythms 69

70 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

Racial and Regional Rhythms 71

72 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

Racial and Regional Rhythms 73

74 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

Racial and Regional Rhythms 75

76 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time

Racial and Regional Rhythms 77

78 Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time