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The Same Again?: Repetition and Refrain in Louis MacNeice
- The Cambridge Quarterly
- Oxford University Press
- Volume 38, Number 3, 2009
- pp. 214-224
- Article
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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.