Ernest Hilbert Introduces a Special Issue for Louis MacNeice
by Ernie on 30/10/07 at 2:29 pm
As editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review, I have assembled a special issue devoted to one of my favorite British poets, Louis MacNeice:
Just as Ben Jonson bore the unfortunate fate of living in what would become known as the “Age of Shakespeare,” Louis MacNeice lives in the long shadow thrown by his exact contemporary, W.H. Auden, who dominated his generation of poets and gave a name to the “Age of Anxiety” (Auden’s book of that title begat a symphony by Leonard Bernstein, secured a Pulitzer Prize for the recently naturalized poet, and was hailed by the New York Public Library as one of the most influential books of the last century). Together they suffered the temporary indignity of being joined as ingredients of “MacSpaunday,” the belittling coinage devised by critic Roy Campbell in his book Flowering Rifle. He amalgamated the names of the four Oxford “thirties poets” who were frequently, and unfairly, thought of as indistinguishable (anti-modernist in poetics, leftist in politics): Louis MacNeice (“Mac”), Stephen Spender (“sp”), W. H. Auden (“au-n”), and Cecil Day-Lewis (“day”).
It has become increasingly clear in recent decades that MacNeice, once consigned to the lower three-quarters of this composite caricature, has much more to offer than those who comprise the bottom half. Spender will likely be remembered largely on the strength of his mid-life memoir World Within World, though he proved peerless when posing in the role of dapper English poet, whether taking tea at an English lawn party or more potent tipples at lunch with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (in some quarters, his fabulous lifestyle earned him the derisive label “toady,” and, a real stinger, the “Rupert Brooke of the Depression”). Cecil Day-Lewis is still thought of as a charming but not terribly important poet, remembered for his honest and ironic reworking of Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (which most readers will recognize by its first line, “Come, live with me and be my love”) and his translations of Virgil’s Georgics and Aeneid.
MacNeice is a separate case, and, while relegated to second place in the pantheon of English “thirties poets,” he is a much closer second than had earlier been imagined. In fact, it seems that if there is a chasm dividing the talents of his generation MacNeice stands on the same rim as Auden, waving to the remaining two across the way.
To read the rest of the introduction, click here.
Ms Baroque
Nov 5th, 2007
Ernie, what a wonderful photograph.
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