Upload
review-by-thomas-mccarthy
View
213
Download
1
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
Fortnight Publications Ltd.
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 .
Accessed: 28/06/2014 13:11
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
Fortnight Publications Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Fortnight.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 141.101.201.139 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 13:11:35 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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
____________ ^__L.^ _____^i ^^> __________ ____ _*' *4____f_t . _____!^ ______ _ __2_B__P ____________________ <^*___3_____ ____H?9 __________________^__i <_L____aa^__f ________?' ______________^^__r^___ ______________i __________^^___P l_______________________k ________r ___r ^_B_______________H^ ______r ___r ^__PV^_________K ______r _____> _^__r# __________|uj _______ ____ _f____r '_________ -
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
^^^VwJIHh Conor O'Malley ^^^H ^^^HH
A Poet's Theatre ________________PJ _^__HHh
e1? Press'Dublin'IR?9-50
__________________________________H___________r _#% ir^iJ^HBii^^^ll^HH^Bp _________________________________________________tw *L ^^^^ HHH_^im ________________________________________________ ak ^^HHHHii^HH^iK^ _______________________________________________________ __5S. _____n_B_IMltnW1ffllll____________W^ff^
^^^^^^^^^^^^flH_^^^iB
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
This content downloaded from 141.101.201.139 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 13:11:35 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions