Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Louis MacNeice and the Irish poetry of his time
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: British
https://www.tcd.ie/English/staff/academic-staff/tom%20walker.php * https://www.tcd.ie/research/profiles/?profile=walkerto * https://tcdrantandrave.wordpress.com/interviews/dr-tom-walker/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2011157241
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2011157241
HEADING: Walker, Tom, 1981-
000 00518nz a2200121n 450
001 8792656
005 20111012062725.0
008 111011n| acannaabn |n aaa c
010 __ |a no2011157241
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca09001711
040 __ |a UkOxU |b eng |c UkOxU
100 1_ |a Walker, Tom, |d 1981-
670 __ |a Louis MacNeice and the Irish poetry of his time, 2010: |b t.p. (Tom Walker, Lincoln Coll.; D.Phil. thesis in English lang. and lit., Univ. of Oxford) thesis cat. inf. form (Walker, Tom Edward John, b. Sept. 16,1981; alternative name: Thomas)
PERSONAL
Born September 16, 1981.
EDUCATION:University of Oxford, B.A., D.Phil.; Trinity College Dublin, M.Phil.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, Ussher Assistant Professor in Irish Writing, 2011—. Has worked as lecturer at University of Oxford, Oxford, England, and as editor of classical music magazines.
AVOCATIONS:Playing trombone, playing cricket.
AWARDS:Grant from Irish Research Council.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Tom Walker, a professor at Trinity College Dublin, examines a major twentieth-century Irish poet in Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of His Time, which grew out of his doctoral work. The book focuses on MacNeice’s relationships with his country and his contemporaries. Some scholars have questioned MacNeice’s Irishness, due partly to the fact that he was a longtime resident of England. Walker, however, asserts that MacNeice remained deeply involved with his native country and his fellow Irish poets, and that he was influenced by them.
Walker’s book, drawing on a variety of archival sources, covers MacNeice’s life from the 1930s to the 1960s. The poet was born in 1907 in Belfast, then part of an undivided Ireland under British rule. He was educated in England, then became a university professor there and worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Those who do not deem him an Irish poet have pointed to his 1935 poem “Valediction,” in which he distanced himself from Ireland, and his BBC debate with fellow Irish bard F. R. Higgins, which saw Higgins argue for a specific national identity in poetry and MacNeice for a broader one. According to Walker, however, some observers have exaggerated the differences in MacNeice’s and Higgins’s views. He also quotes MacNeice as saying, “Higgins after denouncing me for twenty-four hours for having de-Irishized myself asked me if I’d like to belong to the Irish Academy. I said yes.” The two men had a mutual affection and respect, Walker reports, and MacNeice had much admiration for other Irish poets, such as William Butler Yeats, considered by many to be the nation’s greatest poet of the twentieth century. MacNeice wrote a critical study of Yeats in 1941, two years after the latter’s death, and counted Yeats among his influences. Also, Yeats had met MacNeice and considered him promising. Walker further cites MacNeice’s friendships with Sam Hanna Bell, W.R. Rogers, and other poets from Ireland as evidence of his connections to the country, along with the fact that MacNeice based some of his work of medieval Irish writings. Some of the country’s later poets have called MacNeice an inspiration; these include Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, and Michael Longley. Walker, however, seeks to keep the focus on his subject’s “lived creative life” rather than his “literary afterlife.” MacNiece died in 1963.
Several reviewers found Walker’s study persuasive and impressive. “Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of His Time is insightful, articulately written, highly detailed in its analysis, and underpinned by substantial archival research,” remarked Simon Workman in the Review of English Studies. “It compellingly establishes heretofore unrecognized instances of critical engagement and influence between MacNeice and a range of Irish poets in his lifetime. It also compellingly makes the case for a new understanding of mid-twentieth century Irish literary history and MacNeice’s place within it.” In Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies, Alan Gillis observed: “Walker’s book does well to refrain from over-egging the extent to which MacNeice was engaged with his Irish peers. Much of his life and attention were directed elsewhere, and Walker is too assiduous a scholar to leap-frog the facts. Yet he does a marvellous and thorough job of revealing how much engagement there was.” New Hibernia Review contributor Michael A. Moir, Jr., commented that “the MacNeice who emerges in Walker’s study is not always fully engaged by his Irish connections,” yet the author “ably demonstrates” that “MacNeice’s interest in and reading of Irish poetry was deep as well as broad.” J.S. Baggett, writing in Choice, praised Walker’s “fresh approach to MacNeice scholarship and keen insights into 20th-century Irish poetry.” In a similar vein, Moir summed up the book as “a vital addition to a growing corpus of work on MacNeice that looks at familiar texts and relationships with fresh eyes.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, June, 2016, J.S. Baggett, review of Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of His Time, p. 1479.
Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies, autumn-winter, 2016, Alan Gillis, review of Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of His Time, p. 397.
New Hibernia Review, autumn, 2016, Michael A. Moir, Jr., review of Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of His Time, pp. 153-155.
Notes and Queries, volume 63, number 4, 2016, Peter Golphin, review of Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of His Time, pp. 651-652.
Review of English Studies, September, 2016, Simon Workman, review of Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of His Time, pp. 820-822.
Times Higher Education, December 24, 2015, Caroline Magennis, review of Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of His Time, p. 48.
Times Literary Supplement, July 15, 2016, Justin Quinn, “Without Poetry There Is No Country,” p. 14.
ONLINE
Estudios Irlandeses, http://www.estudiosirlandeses.org/ (April 22, 2017), Michael A. Moir, Jr., eview of Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of His Time.
TCD Rant and Rave, https://tcdrantandrave.wordpress.com/ (October 13, 2011), interview with Tom Walker.
Trinity College Dublin Web site, https://www.tcd.ie/ (April 22, 2017), brief biography.*
Dr Tom Walker B.A. (Oxford), M.Phil (Dublin), D.Phil (Oxford)
Ussher Assistant Professor in Irish Writing
Research and Teaching Interests
I came to Trinity in 2011, after completing my doctorate and then working as a lecturer at the University of Oxford. My main research and teaching interests are focussed on twentieth-century Irish writing (especially poetry). I also have broader research interests in the relationship between literature and the other arts, the place of literature on the radio, and questions of literary allusion and collaboration.
I recently published the book-length study Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time. This drew on extensive archival research on both sides of the Irish Sea and the Atlantic to illuminate MacNeice's considerable contact with Irish literary networks and with contemporaneous Irish poetry. I am now primarily undertaking a project entitled 'Yeats and the Writing of Art,' which was recently awarded funding by the Irish Research Council. This examines the work of W.B. Yeats through the prism of nineteenth and twentieth-century art writing – encompassing the many textual forms through which art spectatorship and writing were combined during the period, ranging from aesthetic philosophy to art history to exhibition reviews to ekphrastic poems. Research into other aspects of Irish Writing has resulted in publications on the work of Denis Johnston, Flann O'Brien, Derek Mahon, Austin Clarke, John McGahern and Patrick McCabe, as well as forthcoming essays on Patrick Kavanagh, Richard Murphy and the radio, and the influence of Dylan Thomas on contemporary Irish Poetry.
I teach on a wide range of undergraduate courses. In recent years, this has included offering specialist options on 'Northern Irish Literature and the Troubles,' 'Art Writing' and 'Yeats and the Making of Modern Irish Poetry.' I also contribute various classes and seminars to the M.Phil in Irish Writing. I currently supervise several PhD projects and am always interested to hear from potential research students.
Contact
Dr Tom Walker
School of English
Room 5016
Arts Building
Trinity College
Dublin 2
Telephone: 00353 1 896 4353
E-Mail: walkerto@tcd.ie
Tom Walker
Ussher Asst Prof in Irish Writing, English
walkerto@tcd.ie
+353 1896 4353
0
Publications and Further Research Outputs
Peer-Reviewed Publications
Peer-Reviewed Publications
Tom Walker, Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015 Book, 2015
Nine Rivers from Jordan: Denis Johnston's European journey and Irish search in, editor(s)Dorothea Depner and Guy Woodward , Irish culture and wartime Europe, 1938-48, Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2015, pp161 - 173, [Tom Walker] Book Chapter, 2015
'A true story': The Third Policeman and the Writing of Terror in, editor(s)Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan and Werner Huber , Flann O'Brien: Contesting Legacies, Cork , Cork University Press, 2014, pp126 - 142, [Tom Walker] Book Chapter, 2014
Derek Mahon, The Literary Encyclopedia, 2013, [Tom Walker] Item in dictionary or encyclopaedia, etc, 2013 URL
Louis MacNeice among his Irish Contemporaries, 1939 and 1945 in, editor(s)Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis , The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp196 - 209, [Tom Walker] Book Chapter, 2012
Tom Walker, MacNeice's Byzantium: The Ghosts of Yeats and Eliot in The Burning Perch, The Review of English Studies, 62, (257), 2011, p785 - 804 Journal Article, 2011
Tom Walker, 'Even a still life is alive': Visual Art and Bloomsbury Aesthetics in the Early Poetry of Louis MacNeice, The Cambridge Quarterly , 38, (3), 2009, p196 - 213 Journal Article, 2009
Tom Walker, Some Variant Dates of Composition for Louis MacNeice's Poems, Notes & Queries , 56, (3), 2009, p427 - 428 Journal Article, 2009
Tom Walker, The West of Ireland in John McGahern's Amongst Women and Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy, Beyond Philology , 4, 2007, p193 - 203 Journal Article, 2007
Research Expertise
Description
Projects
Description
Twentieth-century Irish writing and cultural history (especially poetry); art writing; literature on the radio; allusion.
Recognition
Awards and Honours
Representations
Awards and Honours
IRC New Horizons' Research Project Grant - One Starter Grant 2015
Dr. Tom Walker
Interview with Dr. Tom Walker, 13th October 2011. Check out his TCD Profile here.
I understand that you studied at Oxford, and then Trinity and then Oxford again. Could you tell me a little about that?
I did my undergraduate, my BA, at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, which I finished in about 2004, and then I came here to do the M Phil in what was then called Anglo-Irish Literature, and then I actually worked for a year in London. I was an assistant editor of various classical music magazines.
And you decided that you didn’t want to stick with that?
Yeah. I think I knew I always wanted to go back but I kind of wanted to make sure. Have a year working and work out what I actually wanted to do in terms of research. Then I went back to Oxford to do a doctorate, which I finished just under two years ago, and then I had couple of temporary-ish jobs covering people on leave in Oxford, and now I’m here, and I guess that’s the chronology of it!
And how did you end up specialising in Irish Literature?
That’s a good question. People often think I must have an Irish family or something, but I don’t have any Irish ancestry as far as I know. At school I did Portrait of the Artist, which I enjoyed a lot, which I suppose led to me reading other related things. Then as an undergrad I was quite lucky, I was taught by an Irish poet called Bernard O’Donoghue, who taught me in my first year and has been a great help to me ever since. I did some Irish drama with him, things like Synge and O’Casey. In my final year I did a special author course, which was on Joyce, and I was taught by Tom Paulin, another Irish poet, so that’s why I thought about coming here.
And how are you finding being in Trinity as one of the faculty instead of as a student?
It’s very nice. For the Master’s course you’re never in the Department because you’re always in the Oscar Wilde centre, so in a way, although I was here, there was a lot of the Department I never had contact with, but it’s a lovely place to be. The location’s pretty unbeatable.
How do you find it compared to Oxford? It must be quite a different atmosphere.
It’s much more centralised – in Oxford everything’s collegiate and broken up and decentralised, so in that way it’s quite different. The course structures and the way people are taught and assessed are quite different, so that’s all new and I’m trying to get my head around things like ‘freshman’ and ‘sophister’ – this is all new jargon to me. The difference for my teaching is that mostly in Oxford it was one-on-one or one-on-two tutorials, and a lot fewer lectures and seminars.
How do you find that?
It’s fun but a challenge. I mean, writing lectures is quite hard work. There’s a Kingsley Amis quote somewhere where he talks about writing lectures being a lot harder work than people realise.
Is it quite a scary thing giving lectures? Given that public speaking is like the number one fear, is it quite a scary thing or is it just something you take in your stride?
I think I did used to be scared of public speaking, but I did give some lectures in Oxford, and as a research student I gave quite a few seminar papers, so I guess the fear has mostly gone. You sometimes get weird things like when you can suddenly start hearing yourself speak, or that moment where you look out at the audience and everyone’s looking quite glassy-eyed. So far it’s been OK. I gave one lecture to the big first year course on Literary Theory, and that was fine. And I have been giving lectures to a smaller group on fairly recent Northern Irish literature.
Which bits of the literary theory course are you lecturing on?
Formalism and Psychoanalysis.
Are those particular areas of interest of yours?
Well, they’re lectures I took over from Dr. Bernice Murphy as she’s on leave. Formalism is something I’m very interested in – issues of literary language and poetic form, and the history of thinking about that. Psychoanalytic criticism less so.
And whilst you’re here you’re also teaching the Sophister Option Art Writing. Could you talk to me about the crossover with the other art forms? How did you get on to that, and why is it important?
Partly it’s just something I’m interested in – I’ve written one tiny article about MacNeice’s interest in the visual arts (my doctorate was on Louis MacNeice) and I’m currently supposed to be writing something more about Yeats and the visual arts, so I guess on some level it’s a research interest, which is quite nice to teach.
It’s quite a weird thing to box off literature – writers themselves often don’t think of it in that way, they’re very interested in music or art, and they often have a much greater interest in that than literary critics do, so it can lead to a weird kind of distortion. For example, the history of Irish culture is very skewed towards literature, but once you start to be aware of some of the major figures, a lot of them are very interested in visual arts and have lots of links to visual arts – Yeats was the son of a painter, the brother of a painter, his sisters worked in printing and needlework. There is a whole history that’s kind of forgotten there, and that’s maybe also a product to some degree of technology. Books can be a mass medium, but seeing art is harder, particularly if people don’t end up becoming canonical artists, because then they don’t get shown in galleries. I just thought it would be something a bit different.
What other areas of research are you continuing whilst you’re here?
Well my thesis will hopefully at some point see the light of day as a book. I’ve done a few things in the last year which are ongoing. One is to do with the work of John McGahern, and I’ve become quite interested, through thinking about his early career, his early intellectual contexts, He’s a writer who’s quite cunning in portraying himself as kind of naive and simplistic. He wrote a memoir which talked a lot about his childhood and then just stops and says ‘and then I was published’, but that missing bit is about ten years long. So I’ve been doing some research on that and also on comparing Dublin in the 50s in comparison with Soho in the 50s. The way we all think of Ireland in the 50s is kind of miserable, and a very similar thing happens in British literary histories – the 50s is a downtrodden miserable time when everyone’s wearing tweed and is in black and white – whereas if you do a comparative study, some more interesting things arise, and it’s a more bohemian scene than you might realise. Another thing I’d also be interested in this year is the centenary of Flann O’Brien, so I’ve been doing some research into the bicycle in the Third Policemen, and thinking as the bicycle as a cultural symbol, which has led me to think about Republican memoir after the Civil War, and the extent to which Flann O’Brien might be responding to how people having fought quite quickly became people writing about it. But both of those things are a bit of a sideline.
Is it easy to get sidelined?
Yes. With research it tends to be things that you take to conferences. Sometimes you have a half an idea and you say you’ll talk about it at a conference so then you have to do the work.
Is being an academic something you always wanted to do?
From my late teens over my last few years a school, I realised I enjoyed studying, and then at university I knew that I enjoyed it and would maybe want to carry on. I guess the decision to become an academic was more about coming back to do a doctorate, you know, quitting a job and thinking I kind of have to make this work. I guess there’s nothing else I’d want to be – other than things you can’t be, like a great musician or a professional sportsman.
And why English? Why is Literature important to study?
Well, it’s quite rare in life that you get to do something that’s a hobby. Until quite late on at school I didn’t think I was going to do Literature, my A Levels were Maths, Physics, Music and English, and I think I thought I was going to do Physics or Maths, and then you realise the thing you’re choosing to do is to read novels and poems, so why not study that instead of the thing you have to drag yourself through?
So it’s important to do something you enjoy?
Yes, and I guess that can seem a bit decadent, particularly in the current economic climate, and also coming from the UK where the fees debate has been ongoing and you can see why people would choose not to do humanities under those pressures. The silly thing is that even if you are going down that very economic road, a lot of people who do humanities degrees end up being very employable because of their various skills, their ability to think critically and articulate their thoughts, which has always been a strength of university education, as opposed to vocational training. Also, literature is a way you can intersect a lot of other ideas – history, philosophy, it’s a great melting pot.
And do you have time to read for pleasure?
Well the last couple of months have been quite busy, with moving over here, but in general I’m quite bad at reading things for pleasure that aren’t in some way related to work. I know a lot of academics seem to be obsessed with Thrillers as a kind of switch off, and I don’t tend to do that, although at the moment I am actually reading one of John Banville’s Benjamin Black novels. The things I’ve bizarrely begun reading for pleasure are big Victorian novels, which I was particularly resistant to as an undergraduate, but I’ve now realised they’re pretty amazing things.
I assume you can never really turn off that analytical approach?
Yes, I think that is true, although it depends on the speed you read things. If you read quite quickly, things can just suck you in, and certain kind of authors do that to you. I’m a big fan of Coetzee (me and the rest of the world) and I find his books very compelling to the point where I sometimes forget to think about them, which is odd since he is such an overtly intellectual novelist.
And what other kind of interests do you have?
Well, I’m actually a trombone-player, and I used to play in the Trinity Orchestra when I did my masters here. I also play cricket, in a very English way. In Oxford I played for the Bodleian Library, and I’d quite like to play for the staff team here. If it’s good enough for Samuel Beckett …
One last question: If you could be any fictional character, who would you be?
I’ve always felt a bit like Paul Pennyfeather from Waugh’s Decline and Fall, the man whom everything happens to. Another character in the novel describes the world as a merry-go round and Paul just wants to get off and watch it going round. Who would I want to be? That’s a tricky question. I guess, on some level, Becky Sharpe from Vanity Fair. I envy her boldness, her wit and her charm, though not her morals!
Print Marked Items
Quoted in Sidelights: Walker's book does well to refrain from over-egging the extent to which MacNeice was engaged with his
Irish peers. Much of his life and attention were directed elsewhere, and Walker is too assiduous a scholar
to leap-frog the facts. Yet he does a marvellous and thorough job of revealing how much engagement
there was.
Tom Walker, Louis MacNeice and the Irish
Poetry of His Time
Alan Gillis
Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies.
46.2 (Autumn-Winter 2016): p397. From Book Review Index Plus.
http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/iur.2016.0238
COPYRIGHT 2016 Edinburgh University Press
http://www.irishuniversityreview.ie/
Full Text:
Tom Walker, Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of His Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
vi + 216 pages. 60.00 [pounds sterling] GBP.
For Derek Mahon, writing in 1974, the question of Louis MacNeice's Irishness prompted the stifling of a
yawn: "The time is coming fast, if it isn't already here, when the question, "Is so-and-so really an Irish
writer" will clear a room in seconds.' But as Tom Walker's book attests, the question certainly mattered
to MacNeice's Irish contemporaries. In her biography of Patrick Kavanagh, Antoinette Quinn writes of a
'wild hooey ... over Louis' in 1939. Sparked by Austin Clarke saying of MacNeice: 'Let him go back and
labour for Faber and Faber' (surely one of Clarke's best lines), a free-for-all apparently broke out
between poets. Apocryphal or not, Kavanagh would later recount in 'The Battle of the Palace Bar':
They fought like barbarians, these highbrow grammarians,
As I have recorded for the future to hear.
And in no other land could a battle so grand
Have been fought over poetry, but in Ireland my dear!
Irish debate about MacNeice may have tamed over the years, but his deracination and apparent aloofness
remained an issue. Walker relates that Robert Farren in 1948 acknowledged MacNeice's Irish origins, but
dismissed his work as being 'almost wholly English'. In the same year, Clarke described MacNeice as 'a
shadowy and rather wistful wraith, almost a Displaced Person' (check out that capitalisation). For the
Ulster poet Roy McFadden, in full regionalist mode in 1950, MacNeice 'is merely one of an
ever-growing catalogue of names irretrievably lost to this country'. In the same year John Hewitt, the
doyen of Ulster regionalism, claimed MacNeice's Tack of allegiance to something beyond his own
experience, to something more permanent' (by which he meant either region or nation) ensures that
MacNeice 'makes articulate and expresses not so much Man as Metropolitan Man'.
Outside of his own verse, one of MacNeice's great contributions to Irish letters was his work on W.B.
Yeats. But here he also received short shrift. Walker quotes Yeats in 1935, writing to Dorothy Wellesley
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIS...
1 of 9 4/13/2017 12:30 PM
about T.S. Eliot's decision not to publish her poems at Faber: 'This winter they are about to bring out a
volume by MacNeice, an extreme radical.' Later in the same year, in an essay on 'Anglo-Irish Ballads'
which Yeats co-wrote with F.R. Higgins, MacNeice's 'Train to Dublin' is quoted disapprovingly, with the
conclusion: 'He may interest the mind ... but he does not give pleasure to the tongue.' Ouch. Four years
later F.R. Higgins, in a discussion on modern poetry broadcast on BBC radio, would inform MacNeice
that 'you as an Irishman, cannot escape from your blood, nor from our blood-music that brings the racial
character to mind'. To which MacNeice demurred: 'I think one may have such a thing as one's racial
blood music, but that, like one's unconscious, it may be left to take care of itself.'
This exchange, of course, would become well-known, perhaps even central to late twentieth-century
poetics in Ireland, after Paul Muldoon reprinted an edited extract of it as the preface to his Faber Book of
Contemporary Irish Poetry in 1986. Like the Citizen versus Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses, Higgins insists
upon atavisms, MacNeice counters with context and relativity. Walker relates Heather Clark's earlier
analysis of the exchange, and of Muldoon's use of it: 'Muldoon's implication is, obviously, that
MacNeice is the more enlightened of the two; Higgins's ideas about "racial character" sound almost
fascist in hindsight.' Thus Muldoon's editorial intervention helped solidify the grounds upon which
MacNeice could finally be embraced whole-heartedly as an Irish poet, his influence and importance of
the highest order. Backed by the scholarship of Terence Brown, Edna Longley, and Peter McDonald,
among others, and keenly vouchsafed by Michael Longley as well as Mahon and Muldoon, but also by
non-Irish poets prominently emerging in the 1990s such as Simon Armitage, Don Paterson, and Glyn
Maxwell; and newly positioned in the Irish literary canon by Seamus Heaney in a 1993 lecture published
as 'Frontiers of Writing' in The Redress of Poetry; by the end of the twentieth-century, MacNeice had
been welcomed home to an Ireland newly ready to acknowledge its own cultural fluidity.
What is striking and salutary about Tom Walker's book is its lack of interest in this narrative. It is by now
too familiar. Rather than rehearse pre-established interpretations, Walker's study seeks to revisit the
archives, unearth new details, and allow mundane facts to get in the way. His book seeks to return us to
the open-ended thick of things wherein MacNeice lived his days and wrote his verse. The value of his
book is perhaps best exemplified through its treatment of the F.R. Higgins broadcast. Because Muldoon's
preface appeared to present a stand-off between echt-Irishness and rational individuality, one might have
assumed MacNeice and Higgins went their separate and irreconcilable ways after the discussion. But this
wasn't the final word. Walker briskly whisks past the debate, which might well have suggested itself as a
centrepiece of his study, in order to dwell on its lesser-known aftermath. Soon after the debate, he
informs us: 'MacNeice reported: "Higgins after denouncing me for 24 hours for having de-Irishized
myself asked me if I'd like to belong to the Irish Academy. I said yes.'" The pair then engaged in another
broadcast later that year, aimed at reproducing 'the salty, sensitive, exuberant talk of the Dublin literary
pub'. More than a decade after Higgins's death, MacNeice proposed a radio feature on his life and work:
'I would write a considerable amount ... to suggest the man's personality, which was an extraordinary
blend of delicacy and Falstaffianism.' He would also memorialise Higgins as 'Reilly' in Autumn Sequel.
Like much of Walker's book, this may not exactly overturn one's sense of things, but it certainly makes
one pause to think again. It's as if, in some parallel realm outside the pages of Ulysses, Bloom and the
Citizen met again and became pals. A difference turns, not into opposition, but into conversation. This
might offer a less dramatic form of literary history, but perhaps it is a richer version. Higgins's sense of
tribe, MacNeice's sense of flux, were two recognizable reactions to modernity. One might well appear
wrongheaded to liberal perspectives, and indeed we all know that such 'wrong' responses to modernity
would prove historically catastrophic. Yet this is not quite the same as asserting there is a 'right' response.
Certainly, MacNeice knew as much. His verse everywhere suggests that an uncritical celebration of flux
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIS...
2 of 9 4/13/2017 12:30 PM
would be as limited as a reification of roots.
Walker's book does well to refrain from over-egging the extent to which MacNeice was engaged with his
Irish peers. Much of his life and attention were directed elsewhere, and Walker is too assiduous a scholar
to leap-frog the facts. Yet he does a marvellous and thorough job of revealing how much engagement
there was. As with Higgins, so with Irish culture and letters generally: the contact and conversation were
ongoing. And so, with greater detail and with a more coherent focus than we have hitherto been privy to,
we read of his contact and conversation with writers such as Sam Hanna Bell, Austin Clarke, Anthony
Cronin, Robert Farren, John Hewitt, Patrick Kavanagh, Richard Murphy, and W.R. Rodgers; we learn of
his engagement with ideas such as the 'Irish mode' and regionalism; we hear of his interest in Irish
'characters' such as Higgins--complex, contradictory, oppositional, and unpredictable, projecting an
individuality which was itself a response to modernity (MacNeice was one of Dylan Thomas's greatest
celebrants, after all); we follow his fleeting editorship of The Bell and his failed project on 'The
Character of Ireland'; and so on.
All of this is examined with a level-headed exactitude, and Walker's meticulous research will surely be a
boon to further study of mid-twentieth century Irish poetry. His book has been awarded the 'Rhodes prize
for Literature and Language', and the excellence of its scholarship throughout is of the highest order. The
book's greatest virtue is the way in which it is book-ended by two substantial chapters on MacNeice's
poetic dialogue with Yeats, thus enveloping the kinds of material already discussed within the context of
Yeats's more idiosyncratic yet searching engagement with the self-same issues and contexts. The first of
these chapters reads Train to Dublin' in terms of its divergence from Yeatsian aesthetics, and proves
Walker's skill as a close reader of a poem. The final chapter reads 'Budgie' and other poems from
MacNeice's last book in the context of Yeats's Byzantium poems, which, in itself, is certainly bold.
There are, however, issues and problems one might raise. Samuel Beckett is a sorely missed presence.
While one acknowledges that Walker's book, from its very title, is squarely interested in the Irish poetry
of MacNeice's time, it seems a shame that no consideration of his work alongside and against that of
Elizabeth Bowen is offered. Perhaps these are for another day, another critic. More specifically, there are
some slack repetitions, while various chapters might have offered a more forceful central argument.
There is sometimes too great a lacuna between the material examined and the sense we are meant to
make of it. This is a particular problem with the otherwise notable last chapter. Here, MacNeice's
engagement in his last poems with Yeats's Neoplatonism is traced, partially via his friend E. R. Dodd's
intellectual relationship with Stephen McKenna, whose translation of Plotinus was important to Yeats.
Walker's argument suggests a complex response from MacNeice: partially moved to replace Yeats's
idealist Byzantium with something more akin to historical materialism, partially unwilling or unable to
let go of idealism altogether. Walker takes us along a richly paved if labyrinthine exposition, yet the
distance between the detail and his concluding thesis calls for quite a leap.
Nonetheless, that concluding thesis is well-stated, important, and deserves to be circulated. Returning to
the debate with Higgins, and his talk of 'blood-music', that argument was taken by MacNeice as positing
a split between primal song and mind. We have soul, spirit, rootedness, collectivity, depth, and
authenticity on one side, with the detached abstractions, smoke and mirrors of rationality on the other.
More than a mere Irish problem, this is a fundamental split in poetry generally, never likely to go away.
As Walker points out, MacNeice in his book on Yeats returned to Higgins's argument, complaining: 'His
assumption was that a poet should sing rather than think.' Walker's compelling, concluding thesis is that,
in his last great poems, MacNeice turned this split between heart and head into something else. For
MacNeice, as for Yeats before him, song itself becomes, not a repository for pre-established identity, but
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIS...
3 of 9 4/13/2017 12:30 PM
a vehicle for thought. Walker writes: 'MacNeice's late poetry's insistent and frequently unsettling
musicality rediscovers Yeats's legacy to Irish poetry as one of thought and song, or rather thought
through song--In MacNeice's late work, form itself constructs a notion of poetic musicality offering a
mode of cognition. Despite MacNeice's rejection of an idealist sense of form as a sign of art's
supernatural supremacy in the face of time's inevitable destructions, the altogether more tentative claims
his poems make on the future rest, like Yeats's, on the ability of poetic form not only to provide a forum
for thought, but also a means for his poems to keep on causing thought.' One feels like saying: this is
wisdom, pass it on.
ALAN GILLIS
University of Edinburgh
DOI: 10.3366/iur.2016.0238
Gillis, Alan
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gillis, Alan. "Tom Walker, Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of His Time." Irish University Review:
a journal of Irish Studies, vol. 46, no. 2, 2016, p. 397+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps
/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=txshracd2602&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473148697&
it=r&asid=2132b622de0f0d3388565dbca438fde3. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473148697
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIS...
4 of 9 4/13/2017 12:30 PM
Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of His
Time
Peter Golphin
Notes and Queries.
63.4 (Dec. 2016): p651-652. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Golphin, Peter. "Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of His Time." Notes and Queries, vol. 63, no. 4,
2016, pp. 651-652. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=txshracd2602&
v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479563648&it=r&asid=54ade156306cb3fafbb202a7a6d0ff99. Accessed 13
Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479563648
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIS...
5 of 9 4/13/2017 12:30 PM
Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of His
Time
Simon Workman
The Review of English Studies.
67.281 (Sept. 2016): p820-822. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Workman, Simon. "Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of His Time." The Review of English Studies,
vol. 67, no. 281, 2016, pp. 820-822. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&
sw=w&u=txshracd2602&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA467818799&
it=r&asid=2f9a2eb9f08c9bbf0c30cf99b0ac6ada. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A467818799
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIS...
6 of 9 4/13/2017 12:30 PM
Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his
Time
Caroline Magennis
Times Higher Education.
.2235 (Dec. 24, 2015): p48. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Magennis, Caroline. "Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time." Times Higher Education, no.
2235, 2015, p. 48. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=txshracd2602&
v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA441675699&it=r&asid=d6af08f4ad5707b502cb87e915688adf. Accessed
13 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A441675699
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIS...
7 of 9 4/13/2017 12:30 PM
Quoted in Sidelights: fresh
approach to MacNeice scholarship and keen insights into 20th-century Irish poetry.
Walker, Tom: Louis MacNeice and the
Irish poetry of his time
J.S. Baggett
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.10 (June 2016): p1479. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Walker, Tom. Louis MacNeice and the Irish poetry of his time. Oxford, 2015. 216p bibl index ISBN
9780198745150 cloth, $155.00; ISBN 9780191806087 ebook, contact publisher for price
53-4294
PR6025
MARC
Drawing extensively on archival research, Walker (Trinity College Dublin) illuminates MacNeice's
relationship with Irish poetry and literary networks of his time, offering a detailed picture of Irish culture
between the Irish literary revival and the 1960s. Walker challenges prevailing assumptions about
MacNeice's place in Irish and Anglo-Irish literary history. He considers MacNeice in the context of the
poetry written by his contemporaries rather than by his successors. Four chapters move from the 1930s
to the 1960s, revealing how MacNeice's poetry engaged a wide array of other Irish contemporaries and
an earlier generation before the Belfast poets of the 1960s. Walker investigates the important contexts of
literary production and reception, including the role of the BBC and institutions of publication. A major
consideration of this book is MacNeice's relationship with the work of Yeats, who shadowed and shaped
his thinking on modern poetry. Walker provides close readings of specific poems, and offers a fresh
approach to MacNeice scholarship and keen insights into 20th-century Irish poetry. The volume is
valuable for those seeking to understand a wider range of the cultural dynamics and contexts spanning
the decades of MacNeice's career. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates
through faculty.--J. S. Baggett, Lander University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Baggett, J.S. "Walker, Tom: Louis MacNeice and the Irish poetry of his time." CHOICE: Current
Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1479. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps
/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=txshracd2602&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942705&
it=r&asid=1a97703a0fd81aef8da0907c0e147522. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942705
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIS...
8 of 9 4/13/2017 12:30 PM
Without poetry there is no country
Justin Quinn
TLS. Times Literary Supplement.
.5911 (July 15, 2016): p14. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Quinn, Justin. "Without poetry there is no country." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5911, 2016, p.
14+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=txshracd2602&v=2.1&
id=GALE%7CA460427853&it=r&asid=aff8bed1ace546492f2ad00b9ac97e7e. Accessed 13 Apr.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460427853
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIS...
9 of 9 4/13/2017 12:30 PM
Quoted in Sidelights: the MacNeice who emerges in Walker’s study is not always fully engaged by his Irish connections
ably demonstrates … MacNeice’s interest in and reading of Irish poetry was deep as well as broad
a vital addition to a growing corpus of work on MacNeice that looks at familiar texts and relationships with fresh eyes
Reviewed by
Michael A. Moir Jr.
Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time, by Tom Walker, pp. 216. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. $100.
It has become something of a critical truism that it took fifty years after his untimely death to secure Louis MacNeice’s reputation as a major mid-twentieth-century poet. Although he has always been a “poet’s poet”—Anthony Thwaite, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon among other poets have written admiringly of him—his critical reception has remained muted, apart from the efforts of such capable and influential advocates as Edna Longley, Terence Brown, Peter McDonald, and Jon Stallworthy. Since the centenary of MacNeice’s birth in 2007, however, a reappraisal of his life and work has elevated his position in the canons of British and Irish poetry.
This revival of MacNeice’s poetic fortunes has also revived old debates about where to place MacNeice in literary history, however; is he an Irish poet, an English poet, a “Thirties” poet, or a something-else-entirely? Most MacNeice scholars recognize that he is, to some extent, all of these things, though many recent critics have focused on his engagement with specific cultural or national tradition. Richard Danson Brown’s 2009 study, Louis MacNeice and the Poetry of the 1930s, examines MacNeice’s work primarily in relation to his British [End Page 153] contemporaries; Ashok Bery, meanwhile, explores MacNeice’s interest in and connections to India. Tom Walker’s new volume also places MacNeice within a particular cultural context—this time an Irish one—while successfully questioning the rather simplistic idea that MacNeice looked at the country of his birth primarily through the eyes of a “tourist.” Rather, Walker demonstrates that MacNeice was deeply engaged not only with the work that his contemporaries in Ireland were doing, but with a variety of older Irish texts and traditions.
The major Irish precursor poet Walker deals with here is, unsurprisingly, Yeats. Walker’s reading of MacNeice’s complex relationship with Yeats is more than a one-way tale of a younger poet falling under the spell of, then fighting off, an influential elder. Rather, Walker reminds us that MacNeice was a late contemporary of Yeats, and that Yeats read and admired MacNeice, though he regarded the younger poet as an “extreme radical.” MacNeice did report meeting Yeats, the “smeller of spirits,” in his posthumously published unfinished autobiography The Strings are False (1965), but he did so in a way that made the older man look a bit silly; MacNeice behaved a bit flippantly at his funeral. Walker shows that Yeats’s influence on MacNeice is neither superficial nor purely a matter of reaction. Rather, MacNeice’s verse structures and poetic concerns are more indebted to the example of Yeats than is often realized, and not just in his youth. The final chapter traces the influence of Yeats’s rebirth as “the wild old wicked man” on MacNeice’s own late poetic flowering, particularly in MacNeice’s use of refrain and musical structures in poems like “The Taxis.”
The majority of the book is concerned with MacNeice’s exact contemporaries in Ireland, poets like F. R. Higgins, Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, and W. R. Rodgers. MacNeice’s working relationship with Rodgers is well documented: they were BBC colleagues as well as collaborators on a failed book project, to be called “The Character of Ireland,” as is MacNeice’s BBC debate with Higgins over whether or not poetry required any kind of “national” character, which MacNeice, arguing for the cosmopolitan side, is widely regarded as having won. Indeed, many studies of MacNeice’s work and of mid-twentieth century Irish cultural history quote a passage from his The Strings Are False (1965) in which Mac-Neice complains that, as England declared war on Germany, the only thing his poetic friends in Ireland cared to discuss was the correct version of Dublin street songs. This particular passage (along with quotations from the 1944 poem “Neutrality”) has often been employed to suggest that MacNeice should be viewed as isolationist and backwards—but Walker shows MacNeice was to be much more engaged with Irish life and with Irish writing than has been hitherto assumed.
That said, the MacNeice who emerges in Walker’s study is not always fully engaged by his Irish connections. While MacNeice was the poetry editor for the Bell from 1945 to 1947, for example, Walker concedes that he did not do all that much in the role, though it does at least point to his desire to remain involved in Irish [End Page 154] literary circles. Walker should also be commended for the archival research he has done, as MacNeice’s notebooks reveal the extent to which he thought about cultural and artistic developments in Ireland. In a set of preparatory notes for a lecture at the University of Cape Town, for example, MacNeice indicates that he intends to discuss Higgins, Kavanagh, Clarke, and Rodgers alongside traditional ballads and the medieval poem “Pangur Ban.” MacNeice’s interest in and reading of Irish poetry was deep as well as broad, as Walker ably demonstrates. Louis MacNeice and the Ireland of his Time is a vital addition to a growing corpus of work on MacNeice that looks at familiar texts and relationships with fresh eyes.
TOM WALKER. Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of His Time.
Tom
Walker
. Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of His Time.
Pp. v + 216. Oxford
: Oxford University Press
, 2015
. Hardback, £55.
Simon Workman
Review of English Studies (2016) 67 (281): 820-822.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgw037
Published:
31 March 2016
PDF
Cite
Share
Tools
search filter search input
Issue Section:
Reviews
Quoted in Sidelights: Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time is insightful, articulately written, highly detailed in its analysis, and underpinned by substantial archival research. It compellingly establishes heretofore unrecognized instances of critical engagement and influence between MacNeice and a range of Irish poets in his lifetime. It also compellingly makes the case for a new understanding of mid-twentieth century Irish literary history and MacNeice’s place within it.
Louis MacNeice’s status and reputation as a major twentieth-century poet and literary figure looks increasingly secure. This is owing in no small part to the notably high calibre of criticism regarding the poet in recent decades. Walker’s study, which examines MacNeice’s artistic and critical relationship to other Irish poets of his era, shows no drop in this standard and productively builds on the work of Peter McDonald and Edna Longley, two of MacNeice’s most insightful and authoritative critics. Walker’s book also parallels the critical perspectives of Richard Danson Brown’s Louis MacNeice and the Poetry of the 1930s (2009), which reappraises MacNeice’s poetic relations to his English contemporaries, particularly W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and C. Day Lewis. Walker, like Danson Brown, is not centrally concerned with (by now well-rehearsed) arguments about MacNeice’s identity—whether English, Irish, or Anglo-Irish—but rather on explicating the dialogic interrelations between MacNeice’s poems and those of his contemporaries, viewing both as responding to similar historical forces and anxieties.
If MacNeice has been lucky in attracting criticism commensurate with his refined intelligence and remarkable sensibility, he has also been fortunate in eliciting the attention of a stellar group of Irish poets who claimed him as a vital progenitor after his death. Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson, and, especially, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, and Michael Longley have consistently championed MacNeice in their poetry and criticism. These poets’ advocacy, while helping to sustain popular and critical interest in MacNeice’s poetry, also, and inevitably, reinterpreted his verse in accordance with a new set of cultural agendas, aesthetic biases, and ethical codes; the result was that, to quote Auden on Yeats, MacNeice partly ‘became his admirers.’ This process tended to produce a sense of the poet as an enabling archetype of deracinated hybrid identity within Irish letters, a version of MacNeice that has proved particularly pervasive in accounts of his role in the history of twentieth-century Irish poetry. Walker’s study of MacNeice seeks to complicate such formulations by resisting the tendency to conflate ‘MacNeice’s literary afterlife with the complexities of his lived creative life’ (p. 3) and by considering his work in the context of the poetry written by the poets of his own era rather than their successors.
The single most influential Irish poet in MacNeice’s writing is undoubtedly Yeats. MacNeice’s critical and artistic engagement with Yeats’s oeuvre is the most palpable and sustained of all his connections to the work of his Irish contemporaries; it is also the least obscure primarily due to his study of Yeats—the first critical book on the poet—which was published in 1941. Walker’s first chapter charts Yeats’s influence on certain poems MacNeice wrote before the Second World War and offers a fascinating analysis of Yeats’s brief but intriguing reception of MacNeice’s early poetry. This section also highlights the presence of MacNeice’s work within contemporary Irish literary circles and examines critical responses to his writing by Austin Clarke, Roibeárd Ó Faracháin, and F. R. Higgins. MacNeice’s relationship to the latter poet has been a source of much misunderstanding, a point made by the critic Brian Fallon in an article on Higgins written in 1989 for The Irish Times . Speaking of Higgins, Fallon laments that:
… his memory is humiliatingly linked with the verbal exchange between him and Louis MacNeice during their famous radio debate in 1939 (Dylan Thomas in a letter to a friend remarked about this encounter: ‘and both if you ask me were pissed’). Higgins in the official role of folk bard asked rhetorically: ‘Do poets of your school never sing?’ to which MacNeice answered: ‘Do the poets of yours never think?’ It sounds the perfect put down, and it has been evoked by Modernist critics and apologists as their ideal scenario in which the last glow of the Celtic Twilight sinks into the embers before the hard steel-grey daylight of Anglo-American modernism.
As Fallon subsequently states, and as Walker’s new book succinctly argues, ‘things are rarely that simple or categorical’; such glib compartmentalisation conceals the complexity of both poets’ writing, while also distorting their relation to each other and to Irish culture more generally. Rather than a definitive rebuff to Higgins and his poetics, MacNeice’s on-air skirmish marked the beginning of a respectful friendship and formed part of his ‘ongoing struggle with ideas about the poet’s connection to place, race, community, and tradition’ (p. 49). Walker convincingly shows how the obscuring of MacNeice’s relation to Higgins is symptomatic of a larger inattentiveness to the poet’s mutual engagement with Irish writers of his own era.
The book’s opening chapter is followed by four chapters examining MacNeice’s explicit and implicit dialogues with Irish poets such as Bertie Rodgers, Patrick Kavanagh, John Hewitt, Roy McFadden, John Montague, Thomas Kinsella, and Richard Murphy. The discussion moves in a broadly chronological fashion, beginning in the 1930s and finishing in 1960s, and is structured around MacNeice’s interaction with different discourses concerning Irish poetry and literature as espoused by contemporary Irish poets. These include Higgins neo-revivalism, Hewitt’s regionalism, and Rodgers’s aspiration towards the ‘characterization’ of Irish culture. By considering MacNeice’s poems within this less familiar cultural matrix, new correlations, incongruities, and associative significances come into view. As part of his investigation of these complex poetic interrelationships, Walker scrupulously attends to the different processes by which culture was disseminated during this period. Particularly salutary is his concentration on the role played by periodical culture and institutions such as the BBC. This elucidation of MacNeice’s multiform engagements with writers in Ireland in this period accords with a growing sense within Irish studies that the decades from the end of the Irish Literary Revival to mid-twentieth century were more culturally dynamic and less artistically circumscribed than previously depicted.
The final chapter of the book focuses on Yeats’s intertextual presence in MacNeice’s late poetry extending our awareness of the formal resonances and metaphysical dissimilarities between the two poets’ work. Through a number of fine close readings, Walker shows how MacNeice’s final poems rediscover ‘Yeats’s legacy to Irish poetry as one of thought and song, or rather thought through song’ (p. 187). Though Walker presents a dense and convincing argument in this chapter, he unnecessarily repeats a passage quoted earlier in the book regarding MacNeice’s admittedly colourful first meeting with Yeats. He might have substituted this quote for a discussion of Yeats’s response to MacNeice’s translation of Agamemnon of Aeschylus , which was performed by Rupert Doone’s Group Theatre in 1936; the eccentricities of the production caused Yeats to remark to E. R. Dodds (newly appointed Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford) that ‘We are assisting, my dear Dodds, at the death of tragedy'. In reality, Yeats was more sympathetic than this comment implies and it is perhaps surprising that his response to MacNeice’s classical verse drama did not form part of Walker’s discussion of the ‘Yeats–MacNeice interaction’, which is so central to the book’s overall argument.
These, however, are minor quibbles. Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time is insightful, articulately written, highly detailed in its analysis, and underpinned by substantial archival research. It compellingly establishes heretofore unrecognized instances of critical engagement and influence between MacNeice and a range of Irish poets in his lifetime. It also compellingly makes the case for a new understanding of mid-twentieth century Irish literary history and MacNeice’s place within it.
© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press 2016; all rights reserved
Estudios Irlandeses
Issues
About us
Editorial Team
Open Access Policy
Submissions | New Issue
Impact
Links
Contact
Return to Year in Review
Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of His Time | Louis MacNeice: In a Between World
Michael A. Moir, Jr. Georgia Southwestern State University, USA
Creative Commons 4.0 by Michael A. Moir, Jr.. This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged for access.
—
Tom Walker
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
ISBN: 978-0-19-874515
216 pages
Christopher J. Fauske
Sallins, Co. Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2016.
ISBN: 978-1-911024-09-5
176 pages
Recent years have seen a steady increase of the number of books, essays, and journal articles published about the Northern Irish poet Louis MacNeice, long regarded as a minor member of the Auden Group by all but a few stalwart supporters like Edna and Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Terence Brown, and Peter McDonald. It should come as no surprise that MacNeice’s revival occurs at a time of great political and economic upheaval; of all the poets associated with the Left in the 1930s, MacNeice’s skeptical, sardonic voice was perhaps the most critical of both existing institutions and the possibility of revolutionary change. His complicated relationship with Ireland, the country of his birth, and his adopted homes in England and, briefly, America, is mirrored in the politics of the contemporary European Union and the debate over the United Kingdom’s inclusion in it. MacNeice’s “hybrid” identity as an Irish poet resident in England has been much discussed, though recent work has tended to place him primarily in an Irish context. The two works under review, both with much to recommend them, are part of this trend.
Christopher Fauske’s book is probably the more accessible of the two for a newcomer to MacNeice. The title, drawn from the early poem “Spring Sunshine,” highlights the liminality that is so much a part of MacNeice’s work, and the book aims to situate the poet in a series of biographical and historical contexts – his personal and family relationships, his studies at Marlborough and at Oxford, his work for the BBC during and after the Second World War – while stressing the environment of near-constant churn and upheaval in which MacNeice lived and worked. Fauske begins with a chapter on MacNeice’s poetic afterlife, charting his effect on others who knew him and some of the poets who came after him, like Anthony Thwaite, with whom MacNeice shared an office at the BBC, and Seamus Heaney, who tried to pin down MacNeice in his quincunx of poetically significant Irish castles. Throughout each chapter, Fauske relates MacNeice’s work to that of his contemporaries in England and in Ireland, demonstrating that he is a poet who belongs to both places and to neither. Fauske, who has written a biography of John Frederick MacNeice, the poet’s prominent clergyman father, returns here to examine Louis’ fraught relationship with his father and other family members.
The value of Fauske’s book lies in its attempt to synthesize MacNeice’s various contexts into a brief, readable literary biography, perhaps less detailed than Jon Stallworthy’s 1995 life of MacNeice but with closer attention to connections between life and work. There is little close-reading of individual poems here, but Fauske’s purpose does not seem to be to dissect individual lines so much as to provide a comprehensive picture of MacNeice as a poet and as a man, no easy task given the complicated and peripatetic life he led.
The task of contextualization that Tom Walker undertakes in Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of His Time assumes more familiarity with MacNeice and with mid-20th century Irish literature than Fauske’s book. Walker’s primary purpose seems to be to challenge the once-pervasive notion that MacNeice was not particularly engaged with events in Ireland, apart from rugby matches, and that the rejection of Ireland voiced in the 1935 poem “Valediction” entailed a serious commitment to staying out of Irish business. In this engaging and well-researched book, Walker demonstrates that MacNeice was not only aware of and involved in the Irish literary scene of his own time through his friendships with W.R. Rogers, Sam Hanna Bell, and others, he also made use of much older Irish material. MacNeice’s use of the 11th-century Old Irish Immram Mael Duin as the basis for his radio play The Mad Islands is well-known, but Walker’s examination of MacNeice’s notebooks turns up references to the 9th-century Pangur Ban and Irish street songs.
Perhaps MacNeice’s most important connection to the world of Irish poetry is his admiration for W.B. Yeats, which was apparently mutual; Walker shows how much MacNeice respected the older poet (despite the rather flippant portrait of Yeats he paints in The Strings are False) and that Yeats regarded MacNeice as among the most promising of the rising generation of “radical” poets. MacNeice only wrote in a specifically Yeatsian idiom when he was trying to achieve a particular effect, as in poems like “Western Landscape” and “Neutrality” that Walker argues use imagery borrowed from Yeats to satirize the regionalism of John Hewitt and the provincialism of F.R. Higgins – both poets with whom MacNeice enjoyed cordial personal relations, even if he did not share their artistic predilections.
Two books on a poet once considered minor do not add up to a renaissance in MacNeice studies, but the slow but steady stream of excellent work being done on this poet once thought so difficult to place suggests that his reputation is still on the rise. The turnaround in MacNeice’s poetic fortunes is evidence of what can happen to a poet’s reception when liberated from a limiting context – in MacNeice’s case the left-leaning poets of the so-called Auden group, with whom he had relatively little in common apart from age and education – and examined through a different lens. These two studies can be added to David Fitzpatrick’s biography of MacNeice’s father (which attempts to dismantle the image of the father constructed by the son) and Edna Longley and Fran Brearton’s collection of essays from the MacNeice centenary conference in Belfast as important contributions to our understanding of a poet who has always been appreciated by poets; it’s just taken the academy some time to catch up.
Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Google +1
Email
Categories
Categories
All Issues
[Electronic Journal of the Spanish Association for Irish Studies (AEDEI)]
Electronic Journal of the Spanish Association for Irish Studies (AEDEI)
Most Recent Issues
Pages
About us
Contact us
Editorial Team
Impact
Links
Open Access Policy
Submissions | New Issue
Search articles
Creative Commons 4.0
(cc) Creative Commons 4.0 for articles published in Estudios Irlandeses. By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles are free to use, with proper attribution, in educational and other non-commercial settings. | ISSN: 1699-311X
compost | web design