Books: Poetry, Jun. 9, 1941

POEMS 1925-1940—Louis MacNeice —Random House ($2.50).

About a year and a half ago Ulsterman Louis MacNeice, who has written an Irish lion’s share of grade-A contemporary English verse, came to the U.S. to earn a quiet living and see what he could see.

For the most part MacNeice looked at the U.S. from behind literary curtains. He knocked heads with American intelligentsia, taught English literature at Cornell. Last November he returned to England, was found unfit for military service; he is now engaged in war work for BBC.

In the ’20s a group of Oxford poets, sparked by W. H. Auden, and including MacNeice, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis, staged a revolt against current English linguistic muddlement. By introducing modern technological terms into their verse, and by unburdening themselves of their subconscious minds—let the syntax fall where it might—they tried to make their language reflect life as it was actually being lived.

Of all the group, MacNeice had the most gaily matter-of-fact and the most realistically despairing things to say. His three exciting Eclogues (For Christmas, By a Five-Barred Gate, From Iceland) established him among modern-poetry readers as the gleeman-laureate of England’s cushy post-World War I civilization and of its dismal decline. And in his shorter lyrics MacNeice had many high-spirited skirmishes with reality:

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was

Spawning snow and pink roses against it

Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:

World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

The drunkenness of things being various.

The modern world seemed so crazily various to MacNeice that when he thought soberly about it he felt quite drunk. With his intoxication for inspiration he turned out some of the most telling poems in contemporary literature. But the older he grew, and the less easily intoxicated by things he became, the more he kept himself in writing fettle by getting drunk on his own words. In consequence, much of his later verse (notably his brilliantly loquacious Autumn Journal} is lively but devitalizing reading. It contains humorous, tender and thoughtful patches; but for the most part it reveals an ugly picture of a man writing with a stiff, long upper lip and a flaccid heart.

Perhaps a sense that something was going wrong with his writing, as much as his loyalty to his foster motherland, prompted MacNeice to return to England and the war. Readers of his book will feel glad that he went. Armageddon seems just what a divine doctor would prescribe for the author of Poems 1925-1940. Armageddon—or Siloam.