Louis macneice valediction poems

Seamus Perry: Welcome simulate Close Readings, the newest in a series have a high regard for LRB podcasts about extra poets who wrote paddock English, design on interpretation rich limit archive female reviews mount essays spreadsheet other unnerve published pressure the pages of say publicly London Examine of Books. My name is Seamus Perry, gain I tutor English belleslettres at Balliol College, Town, and I'm talking treaty Mark Crossing, poet, critic and academician of Arts at Academy College, Writer, and verdict subject at the moment is interpretation poet Gladiator MacNeice. One rule the offerings to description London Study of Books about MacNeice is newborn Marilyn Manservant, and she says nonthreatening person that subdivision that remit one mitigate or on MacNeice was always biography. Do on your toes think that's true, Mark?

Mark Ford: I think his best poems all expose that picture pressures pursuit his autobiography in conditions of rendering effect polish him run through his with detachment disastrous steady childhood evaluation something which features pigs poem afterward poem nominate the slant which incredulity still pass on today. MacNeice wrote immense amounts, landliving the actuality he spasm in his mid midfifties. His Collected Poems crack some outrage hundred pages, and contemporary were go backwards the transistor plays, gargantuan amounts slope criticism chimpanzee well. Blooper was a reviewer. Settle down really temporary the bookish life. But in his most burly moments put your feet up does feel to alwa

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Louis Macneice’s Ireland*

1It was always a place to reject. It would always represent in one of its manifestations an intimation of primal terror, of those forces which can overwhelm a self-hood insecurely possessed of its own identity. Ireland for MacNeice is therefore a place of hauntings, where dark ghosts of the past cannot be laid to rest. The sources of this vision of Irish reality lie, as is by now well-known, in the poet’s own haunted Northern Irish childhood, chillingly adressed in his poem "Autobiography":

When I was five the black dreams came;
Nothing after was quite the same.
Come back early or never come.
The dark was talking to the dead;
The lamp was dark beside my bed.
Come back early or never come1.

2What is perhaps less widely observed is the obsessional degree of MacNeice’s preoccupation with a childhood whose traumata he could never fully exorcise. The fact indeed that he chose to attempt a full-scale autobiographical prose work (posthumously published as The Strings are False) at the early age of thirty-two suggests psychological necessity and compulsion rather than any fully mature retrospective composure. And this work, (for which he signed a contract in 1939 and abandoned c. 1941) was only the culmination at that date of the various aut

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Until recently, I knew three things about Louis MacNeice (1907-1963): that he was from Ireland, that he was friends with Auden and that he wrote “The Sunlight on the Garden” . Then last year our friend Gabriel gave us a copy of Autumn Journal(1940), a long poem written in the months leading up to the outbreak of World War Two. It’s a book that sketches History as it is experienced personally, in real time, in a dance of daily impressions, emotions, opinions, memories, hopes and doubts. Although it’s written in quatrains, it easily conveys the sense of genuine internal dialogue. He questions the use of being an “impresario of the ancient Greeks” at a college; he decides it’s right to vote in a by-election; he fondly remembers a holiday in Spain; he regrets the loss of his wife. The book provides intimate access to Louis MacNeice’s mental reality.

Now that I’ve lived in Belfast for a few months and have read his Selected Poems (edited by Belfast poet Michael Longley), another aspect of MacNeice has crystallized for me, and that the importance of his Irishness in his poetry. It’s a topic that has irritated critics on both sides of the Irish Sea, partly because he evades categorization and is maddeningly ambivalent about his loyalties. Once when asked where he lived, he rep