Abstract

This article accounts in various ways for the forms of repetition and refrain in Louis MacNeice's poems: as a deliberate use of the resources of popular poetry and song; as a response to Yeats; as an exploitation of cliché. Noticing an original kind of 'self-deconstructing' refrain in the later poetry, Corcoran also reads these devices as a response to psychological and emotional damage and as a confrontation with death. In this poet, repetition and refrain also become implicitly forms of argument with a particular kind of modernism, and a defence of his own 'vulgar', democratising kind.

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