'Modernism from the Margins' Louis MacNeice and Modernism.

Louis MacNeice seems to be suffering, or enduring or benefitting from a re appraisal. But some of the re appraising seems dubious.

"Modernism from the Margins: the 1930s poetry of Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas" by Chris Wigginton. According to the blurb on Goodreads;

"This book is an important contribution to contemporary discussions of both of these writers, and of the general issues of modernism, postmodernism, literary identity, and cultural identity it raises".

Well, maybe.

But while I'm sure someone somewhere is excited by all those things, I wonder what happened to scholarship.

Reacting to other critics, especially Edna Longley and Peter MacDonald who according to Wigginton argue for MacNeice's "rejection of Modernism",  Wigginton extracts some quotes from MacNeice's critical writings to argue the opposite. The key is the verb 'extracts'.


He [MacNeice] observes Eliotically that:

'Pound takes the whole of history as stock for his soup and cuts backwards and forwards from one country or one century to another, adding plenty of the smell of cooking and the voice of the type writer to make it clear that all these elements combine for him in a living and contemporary whole.'

MacNeice's ventriloquizing of Eliot in order to endorse Pound is revealing of his complex, ambivalent critical attitude to Modernist aestheticism, and the critical work should not therefore be taken simply to endorse a recession of Modernist practise in his poetry of the 1930s. (p13)

Taken out of context, simply as words on the page, in what way does the quote endorse Pound? or his method? For someone as careful as MacNeice, that "for him' surely qualifies the statement.

But what's bothering me here is that there is some very selective cutting at work.

The paragraph Wigginton quotes is from a chapter in 'Modern Poetry' called 'Obscurity' and begins:

'The extreme example of this method is Ezra Pound's Cantos'.

[The 'Method" is the bringing together of apparently unrelated elements to make a whole: Eliot's 'cooking and Spinoza' which MacNeice has just quoted.]

The passage Wigginton quotes continues immediately: 'I doubt if they will so combine for many of his [Pound's] readers. In a poem on so large a scale the method palls and Pound's bits of history and culture are so diverse and so particular as to fail to arouse many echoes' "Modern Poetry (p.163-164).

I don't see this an endorsement. It sounds like failure. The discussion of Pound in this section ends:

'For the Eliot-Pound method allows of the bodily transference into a poem not only of tags from other poetry or prose but of bits of public records, washing-bills, statistics. Sometimes as in The Waste Land, such ingredients blend successfully, fused together by an intense lyrical theme, but on the whole I consider this method to be vicious. The poem tends to remain heterogeneous and therefore bad'.(p164-165)

So th method is "vicious" and leads to "bad" poems.

Cherry picking quotes is something everyone does: MacNeice was always happily ambivalent about most things, and I think Wigginton might be right to argue that he didn't "reject modernism", but selecting the bit that proves your preferred version of the world when it's embedded in text which flatly contradicts your preferred version doesn't seem like good critical practice.

In the rush to be political and theoretical, something got lost. And yet Wigginton is right, I think, to say that MacNeice's attitude toward an undefined Modernism was ambivalent. In his critical writings, on Yeats and in "Modern Poetry" MacNeice allowed his ambivalence to stay open, so that statements are always being questioned and reviewed from a different perspective. This openness to contradictions and willingness to explore more than one side of the argument  is a lesson most critics don't seem to have learnt.

T.S. Eliot Louis MacNeice and the jellyfish school of poetry

Louis MacNeice in ‘The Poetry of W.B.Yeats’.

         Eliot…had maintained that the poet must adapt himself to his world; if his world is difficult and complex, his poetry must be difficult and complex…Poets like Auden and Spender abandoned this feminine conception of poetry and returned to the old arrogant principle-which was Yeats’s too-that it is the poet’s job to make sense of the world, to simplify it, to put shape on it. The fact that these younger poets proposed to stylize their world in accordance with communist doctrine or psycho-analytical [sic] theory (both things repugnant to Yeats) is comparatively irrelevant. Whatever their system was, they stood with Yeats for system against chaos, for a positive art against a passive impressionism. Where Eliot had seen misery, frustration and ruins, they saw heroic struggle-or, sometimes, heroic defeat-and they saw ruins rebuilding. (p.191)

The identification of passivity as feminine dates this unpleasantly, but I think the point is a good one. Eliot’s ‘passive impressionism’ is the jellyfish approach to poetry. 

This time of year, if the wind holds from the northeast, the high tide line is marked by stranded blue jellyfish…they drift along, and when the wind goes the wrong way they get stranded and die.

Perhaps this might have made some sense in the aftermath of the First world war, though it's interesting that Eliot didn't serve, and writers like David Jones and Robert Graves, who did, in their very different ways, went looking for pattern. But I don’t understand why it’s still such a popular attitude a hundred years later. There’s a dominant thread in modern poetry which tries to make impersonating a wind blown jellyfish some sort of exemplary activity and looks down its nose at anything which reaches for pattern and purpose:

Oh woe is me, didn’t some dead guru say words are arbitrary acoustic signs, there is no transcendental signifier, life doesn’t make sense, the subject is liable to be scattered, the individual is battered from all sides…it’s as though all the jellyfish drifting inevitably towards the beach were theorizing and conceptualizing their own indolence so that they could feel superior about being stranded.

MacNeice argues here and elsewhere for art in general and poetry specifically as an act of making which is inherently positive. This explains his initially strange statement that a poem in praise of suicide is an act of homage to life, and it lies behind the magnificent:

Self-assertion more often than not is vulgar, but a live and vulgar dog who keeps on barking is better than a dead lion, however dignified. (SP p. 48)

There is nothing dignified about a stranded Jellyfish.

Incorrigibly Plural: the reinvention of Louis MacNeice

Incorrigibly Plural: Louise MacNeice and His legacy. Carcanet 2012

"Incorrigibly Plural celebrates the diversity and vitality of Louis MacNeice's writing. Poets and critics illuminate the work of a writer whose achievement and influence is increasingly recognised as central to modern poetry in English" (From the Blurb) 

The reinvention, rediscovery or re evaluation of Louis MacNeice is an ongoing project and for lovers of his poetry fascinating to watch.   Peter MacDonald's beautiful "Collected’ is as much a part of it as this book of essays.  However, attempts to claim centrality and significance for his work run into two problems: the first is simply one of evidence. The second, the inevitable problem caused by multiple, contending and often hostile modern poetics fractured and smeared to all points of the compass. It's difficult to imagine any poet who could be "Central to [all] modern poetry in English".

He wrote one of my favourite poems, the first poem I consciously learnt by heart for no reason than the pleasure of it in about 1975. I’d take him over Auden any day of the week.  But a quick shift through the books on hand provides the following standard readings:

A thirties poet, a school boy poet,  a name tacked onto a list that started “Auden, Spender, Day-Lewis…” as though he wasn’t quite as important or as interesting as the others or wasn’t distinct enough to make it on his own. 

There is no mention of him in Kenner’s “The Sinking island” although the thirties get their own chapter. Nor does he rate a mention in “A Colder Eye: the Modern Irish writers.”  Rosenthal and Gall don’t discuss Autumn Journal but they don’t do  The Great Hunger either.

Typical of most surveys is MacNeice’s  appearances in Michael Alexander’s “A History of English Literature”: a name in a group (without him the MacSpaunday jibe doesn’t work): ”Day-Lewis is remembered for his versions of Vergil. He became Laureate in 1968, and Spender was knighted for services to literature. Isherwood was clever, MacNeice talented, Auden Major.”  Though he does get a whole sentence to himself: “MacNeice wrote an open, journalistic, colloquial verse of his own, notably in Autumn Journal  about 1938-9).” But this sentence leads off a two page section on W.H.Auden. (It’s more than Bunting gets: he doesn’t even rate a mention). 

He is always either qualifying a discussion of Auden or lurking in the background.  Michael Schmidt gives him four pages in The Lives of the Poets  and his summing up seems judicious even if it seems to suggest that he is worth reading for his control of rhythm.  He describes him as “Kavanagh to Auden’s Clarke”.

In the Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry he shares a chapter with Clark, Colum and Kavanagh…which goes to show how hard he is to pigeon hole.  And while Autumn journal gets some praise here it’s the kind of “however” praise that can bury its subject.

The link to Kavanagh, at first so odd, is perhaps not as inappropriate at it seems; both poets’ “Greatest hits” would sit easily with any other poet’s in the twentieth century and both wrote a great deal that strains the reader’s good will. 

Michael Longley’s claim that MacNeice wrote some of the best love poems in English is a hard one to argue with, and I’d add  Autumn Journal is probably one of the few successful long poems of the twentieth century. Granted a different type of long poem, with more in common with The Great Hunger than the Cantos. But endlessly rereading Peter MacDonald’s edition of MacNeice’s Collected Poems there’s a sense that there’s a lot there that doesn’t live up to the highlights.     

 So this new book is interesting firstly for its claim which seems mostly unsubstantiated. That people turn up to a MacNeice centenary doesn’t really prove a great deal and showing that Phillip Larkin was influenced by him is hardly going to win friends and influence people.

Having said that, this is a fine collection of Essays. Old fashioned literary criticism is thankfully not dead and pseudo Derridean syntax not the only game in town:  the writers, having something worth saying about poet or poem, are at pains to covey that insight to the reader in clear prose. Good literary criticism sends you back to what you thought you already knew to look at it again.  Peter MacDonald's essay on "Cradle Song for Eleanor", which leads off the volume, is worth the price of admission.  Edna Longley compares two 'Classicists', MacNeice and Graves and mines the Juxtaposition, while Glyn Maxwell does a fine reading of 'Autumn Journal' and finishes his essay with a succinct explanation of why 'Autumn Sequel fails'. He does it in one sentence. 

Scattered amongst the longer essays are shorter pieces: a short 'memoir' by Dan MacNeice, Derek Mahon describing two meetings with Louis, modern poets writing briefly about what MacNeice means to them.   And an essay by Paul Muldoon.  Anyone who has read 'To Ireland I' will know exactly what to expect. Surrounded by the other essays, the Muldoon’s familiar pyrotechnics look too much like smoke and mirrors. And I would have traded it for a longer essay by Derek Mahon.

So this is a book of good essays, and like fine books of literary essays will reward rereading. I don’t think it matter if MacNeice was “central to Poetry in English” or not.  Like most similar claims it invites too many disagreements and nudges towards being silly.   But this book does him the tribute of taking his work seriously and prizing him out of “Macspaunday”.

 And, given the subject, there’s also humor in the writing and the sense that the poems and their author belonged in the real world, not in the library.  In an essay called: "The ladies will say he looks like a poet; Tom and the selling of Louis', Ann Margaret Daniel traces Eliot's dealings with MacNeice.  She exposes the subtleties of the relationship without needing to overstate anything.  Those of us who have to stop occasionally and remember how many ts Eliot stuck on his surname will feel reassured by the fact that he consistently seems to have misspelled 'MacNeice'. 

Discussing their similarities she writes:

'MacNeice also shared Eliot's love of music hall theatre and the music hall...the side of Eliot that danced The Grizzly Bear with Virginia Woolf (a video that we can only be glad, or immensely sad, will never appear on YouTube).'

The instantly forgettable poem #2

Back in 1975 or 76 I memorized MacNeice’s Cradle song for Eleanor. It was in an anthology of poems we were abusing in class, along with Bagpipe Music and Prayer before Birth, and MacNeice was not one of the poets we were studying. (R.S. Thomas, Sir John Betjeman, and Robert Graves were also in the anthology and they weren’t on the syllabus either. An all boys school, we were DOING “War Poets”. )
Someone should write a thesis on the reasons why English teachers will keep on pushing those "War Poets".

Cradle Song was one of the first poems that cut through the classroom dullness and turned me towards poetry. Far too many years later I have a head full of poems and bits of poems, lines, phrases, images, from Robert Service and Rudyard Kipling to Bunting and William Carlos William, via Old English and God alone knows where else. But Cradle Song, like Kipling’s Three Part Song and Kavanagh’s Kerr’s Ass is special and it's still there.

I am not suggesting that “memorability” is the only test of a good poem. That would be silly. Learning Briggflatts would be a party piece and nothing else, trying to learn the better cantos would just be silly.

I’m not even sure that memorability, in itself, is any sign of excellence. About the same time I learnt Cradle Song I learnt:
Cohen’s
I never knew/ until you walked away/ you had the perfect arse/forgive me/ for not falling in love/with your face or your conversation. (I didn’t learn where the line breaks are.)

The old Cadbury Drinking Chocolate ad’ which consisted entirely of:
‘Hot chocolate drinking chocolate, hot chocolate, drinking chocolate”

And a song with the irritating chorus “Coeey chirpy chirpy cheap cheap” and lyrics that began:
Where’s your mama gone
Little Baby now
Where’s your mama gone

And I’m not advancing any claims for any of these as poetry. In fact I would give a fair bit to have two of them surgically removed from my memory. (The Cadbury’s ad can stay.)

However,

What intrigues is how much of the poetry I read and have read is instantly forgettable. It is published which should mean something, politically correct, technically excellent, approved, lauded, prize winning, beblurbed to the heavens, but instantly and utterly forgettable. Sometimes even before I've finished the poem itself.

There are whole collections of poems I have bought, read and remember nothing about.

In one case all I remember is the cover of the book: I don’t even remember its title.

So what is the point of all this instantly forgettable poetry? Why is there so much of it? What purpose does it serve? Why do people write it and publish it? Does anyone read it? Why do I keep buying it?
Answers on a postcard please……

The forgettable poem #1

Is an interesting phenomena.
But first a different, less explicable type of forgetting.

Having spent twelve months reading poetry I have to read, I’ve been having a holiday and reading Louise MacNeice’s “Collected Poems.”

In his introduction to the Faber poets on poets edition Michael Longley claims MacNeice wrote some of the finest love poems in the language. For what it’s worth, I agree with him. I’m not convinced by ‘Mayfly’ (one of Longley’s candidates) , but I’d back him on ‘Cradle song’, ‘Meeting point’ and ‘The introduction’.

MacNeice tends to be forgotten. The Thirties are Auden, Or young Dylan Thomas. “Modernism” is on its way to being an established ism and perhaps a university subject. In “The Sinking Island” Hugh Kenner, blasting the thirties as “A dishonest decade”, is too busy assaulting Auden to even mention MacNeice. In the companion volume, “A Colder Eye: the modern Irish writers’ Austin Clarke gets five or six pages. MacNeice, as far as I can tell, doesn’t even make the footnotes.
Why someone this good is so forgotten is an interesting question.

His poems sing. The line is essentially melodic, whether the poem is a short “lyric” like “The Introduction”, or an extended demonstration of Terza Rima like the second “Autumn Journal”. There’s enough technical virtuosity to keep anyone happy. There’s an obvious intelligence working behind the line so that it’s not just a vacuous melody. The poems move in a reconisable urban landscape where most people live, have friends, jobs, go on holiday, fall in and out of love.

Not a critic’s poet, certainly. But a reader’s poet? Surely?

If you can be this good, and mostly forgotten, what does that say about the field of cultural production that is poetry? How can anyone keep a straight face and argue that quality will win through?