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The Outsider of Irish PoetrySelected Poems by Louis MacNeice by Michael Longley; Louis MacNeice; Louis MacNeice: AStudy by Edna LongleyReview by: Thomas McCarthyFortnight, No. 266 (Oct., 1988), p. 19Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25551703 .

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BOOKS

The outsider of

Irish poetry Thomas McCarthy

Michael Longley ed Selected Poems by Louis MacNeice

Edna Longley Louis MacNeice: a study

Both Faber & Faber, ?4.95

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Twentieth-century man

LOUIS MACNEICE and Michael

Longley are probably Ulster's most

devout Connemaramen. That Longley should have been chosen to make this

new selection of MacNeice poems is a

happy conjunction of like-minded tal

ents. Both poets are Anglican in out

look, yet happy to succumb to life's

sensations.

As Derek Mahon noted in the Irish

Times, MacNeice is having a comback.

About time too?it is 21 years since

Austin Clarke had his comeback and

Patrick Kavanagh has been coming back ever since the publication of

Come Dance with Kitty Stobling. So why has it taken so long for us to

rediscover MacNeice? The answers are simple: he was an Ulster poet

marginalised by Dublin conversation; in England he was marginalised by association with the Birmingham group; and he was a left-wing poet

marginalised by his own scepticism. Most of all, he was crippled by a

patronising and inadequate selection of his poems by Auden.

For the last 15 years the axis of Irish poetry has shifted north. The new

Kavanaghs and Flann O'Briens need no longer become bogus Dubliners

in order to be at the centre of things. These two new MacNeice books are

part of the Ulster repossession. "The rugby tradition makes two virtues supreme?individual endur

ance and the open game," MacNeice wrote in The Strings are False. He

was describing a game between Cornell and Syracuse, and was not

impressed. He felt that American footballers were too pampered. His

attitude to poetry was the same: he admired bravery, honesty and

scepticism in politics and religion, endurance in human adventures.

In this new Selected Poems Michael Longley gives us a much clearer

view of MacNeice's breadth. We see the poet up and running, clearer than

in Auden's wet field-glasses, his obvious lyrical talent made more durable

by an epic political intelligence:

So reading the memoirs of Maud Gonne,

Daughter of an English mother and a soldier father, I note how a single purpose can be founded on

A jumble of opposites: Dublin Castle, the vice-regal ball, The embassies of Europe, Hatred scribbled on a wall...

Autumn Journal and the terrifying, exhilarating years 1938-44

provide the fulcrum of MacNeice's work. When he wrote Autumn

Journal, Kavanagh was working on The Great Hunger: two Ulster

epics, both published in London, yet worlds apart. Now the psycho-sexual

problems of Paddy Maguire seem dated, while MacNeice's "Confer

ences, adjournments, ultimatums," or "Give me a houri but houris are too

easy,/Give me a nun" or "Sleep quietly, Marx and Freud,/The figure heads of our transition" are still relevant and influential in tone and theme.

So much of what MacNeice wrote seems a prequel to the work of

Longley, Mahon and Muldoon?one reads this selection with a sense of

dejd vu. Was it the MacNeice of Closing Album who allowed Longley to

write his Mayo poems? Was it the MacNeice of The Sunlight on the Garden and Carrick Revisited who taught Mahon to write the perfect

lyrics of Hunt by Night? And wasn't it the MacNeice of revitalised cliche and wisecrack who taught Muldoon everything? Even minor poems like

Selva Obscura and Flower Show have made a hundred minor poets blossom. This selection may reveal what is implicit in all of us, the modern

lyric tone of MacNeice. And yet it will innoculate us all against what

Longley calls "political certainties and false optimism".

EDNA Longley has already dealt with Louis MacNeice in two chapters of Poetry in the Wars (1986). She is a very thorough critic, great nervous

energy pushing her structuralist methods to the limit. She is at the height of her powers, with the moral audacity of a Daniel Corkery and the finesse

of Ernest Dowden. Her one belief, and her only religious one, is that

aesthetic achievements complete and clarify reality?especially Anglo Irish reality:

MacNeice's efforts to reconcile 'solitude' and 'communion' (the 'union of

solitude' of Round the Corner), whether socially or spiritually directed, derive in part from his loss of the fixed cultural-religious co-ordinates which still place a majority of his countrymen.

She pursues the dialectical tensions in MacNeice with all the energy of a

young terrier. She quotes the poet:

I would venture the generalisation that most of these poems are two-way affairs or at least spiral ones: even in the most evil picture the good things ... are still

there...

Longley divides her study into six essays: on MacNeice's Ireland, his

urban and English world, Autumn Journal (this is quite different from

her 1986 book) and his critical heritage. MacNeice enjoyed exploiting the contradictions in his background. His father was a Protestant clergyman, later bishop of Down, Connor and Dromore, who refused to sign the

Ulster Covenant of 1912. The poet was educated at Sherbourne, Marlbor

ough and Merton College, thus acquiring a perfect English veneer. All the

explosive natal Irish experience was held inside this cool Classical sack.

But Longley proves that he was no mere tourist in Ireland: he had "a

stake in the country and the country a stake in his poetry". Sure, he was

a 30s poet, but Ireland was the Berlin he had to say goodbye to, and like

any faithful son he came back constantly to say goodbye. To the practising poet, Longley's chapter Colour and Meaning may

prove the most valuable. She traces the development of MacNeice's

theories through the prose works and, in parallel, the development of his

craft through Autumn Journal to The Burning Perch. Her reading of the

long poem is gifted, as always:

The protean quatrain of Autumn Journal accommodates every change of tone and angle. It is a precision instrument for establishing all the poem's other alterations: between pictures and generalisations, optimism and irony, neces

sity and possibility, historical flux and artistic poise.

Like all good poets in western culture MacNeice began and ended in

ambiguity. Coda, his closing poem, is as mysterious as it is beautiful:

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...

"That poem," Longley writes, "says everything: an Everyman parable

uniting long-term and short-term human history, scepticism and belief."

Louis MacNeice is the one Irish poet we all share equally. Like Portora

Royal's gifted young Beckett, he is our constant outsider. This tightly written study and the new Selected Poems should rehabilitate the stature

of Ireland's first really 20th century poet.

Lyrical tales

|H^^HP]B9 John Keyes

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His rise was resistible?was the Lyric's decline?

A POET'S Theatre, according to the author, is a history of the Lyric

Players Theatre up to 1981. Few people should be better placed to write

it: as son of the founders Dr O'Malley absorbed information or, at least, emotions about the theatre from his infancy. Perhaps this is the trouble.

Fortnight October 19

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