The unmoving constellations: the poetry of Louis MacNeice.(Literature)(Critical essay)

READING THE ANGLO-IRISH poet Louis MacNeice (1907-63) today, it really does seem as if little has changed but the "ever-changing conveniences". When he writes of "why I turn this jaded music on / To forswear thought and become an automat" he is thinking of the wind-up gramophone rather than the iPod; those "faces behind the triplex screens" are still there, but nowadays busy with their mobile phones and computer navigation systems; the "trams like vast sarcophagi" left British cities soon after he wrote of them, but are now returning again.

Few poets have been so attentive to the Modern as MacNeice, and it might be thought that his poetry would go down with that word, sunk by the weight of an age's jargon. Curiously, it remains buoyant. This is partly because he writes about concerns which have not gone away.

MacNeice's poems are dazzling fireworks, but the unmoving constellations in the darkness after the display are what impress us most. It is not surprising that he writes so convincingly in "The Mixer" of the brightly sociable fellow who is

 
      only real in the range of laughter; 
   Behind his eyes are shadows of a night 
   In Flanders ... 

There are many shadows in MacNeice's own life, some as dramatic as the memory of seeing the Titanic leave Belfast, others as domestic as the locked lid of a trunk with initials on it, recounted in his unfinished autobiography, The Strings are False. The darkest shadows are associated with his sick mother's departure from his life: "When I was five the black dreams came; / Nothing after was quite the same." Not, that is, until his father (an Anglican priest) taught him Latin, when suddenly "the wind blew down the vistas" and he felt liberated from the tyranny of Miss MacReady, his "sour and die-hard Puritanical" Mother's Help.

He took to school with great enthusiasm: Sherborne, where the poetry-loving headmaster was a Powys (brother to John Cowper, T.F. and Llewelyn), then a classical scholarship to Marlborough--where he came to know future Poet Laureate John Betjeman and future spy Anthony Blunt. By the time he left Marlborough and its grim public school rituals and went up to Merton College, Oxford, MacNeice had discovered (a) a great deal of English poetry (b) a love of rugby and (c) that--as Blunt put it--he was "totally and unredeemably heterosexual". This is one of the reasons he was always something of an outsider, famously dour and moody, "an intellectual snob" as his biographer Jon Stallworthy calls him.

He did track down Auden, who would become a good friend. Spender remained more distant and Day Lewis had yet to cross his path. Eventually, of course, they would be satirically yoked together by Roy Campbell as "Macspaunday", the composite Thirties Poet. The young MacNeice was more interested in drinking and having a riotous time than in writing or studying; but inevitably he managed a Double First.