Louis MacNeice's Poetry of Ambivalence

MICHAEL KIRKHAM Louis MacNeice's Poetry of Ambivalence 'MacSpaunday: a satirical acronym formed from the names MacNeice, Spender, Auden, and Day Lewis, was Roy Campbell's label for the group of poets who dominated the English literary scene in the '930S and whose work, in the foreshortening perspective of literary history, has been taken to be not only the most characteristic but also the most interesting poetry of the period. The high esteem enjoyed by Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis was an accident of literary fashion; of the four only W.H. Auden and his friend Louis MacNeice poetically survived the thirties to produce a body of poetry that has outlasted their early reputations. In the case of Auden, criticism and exegesis have established a degree of clarity. Assessments of his poetry as a whole, identification of its strengths and weaknesses, and preferences between different parts of his work may vary widely, but there is approximate agreement on what the critical issues are. MacNeice is not so fortunate. His middle and later work, unjustly, received less attention than his earliest. Since his death in '963, it is true, several books about his poetry have appeared; but though he has become at least subject for academic study, he has not become, so far as I am aware, a subject of discussion. In Auden and After Francis Scarfe, writing in 1941, concludes his assessment of MacNeice's first, productive decade with this verdict: his 'attitude to life and poetry has led to a series of negations: there is no centre, as yet, to his work." This was true then and in some sense was always to be true. His poetry lacks certainties, firm convictions, a secure standpoint. Some fine poems of the thirties and many more written in the forties and fifties prove, however, that poetry can accommodate or transform uncertainty . But Scarfe had in mind the bulk of his early work in which he failed to do this; a representative example would be 'Train to Dublin.' The 'attitude to life' and by implication the view of poetry in it have produced an unfocused and only superficially coherent poem. The loose form is typical: the theme stated, repeated, and illustrated with a list of examples that could be extended indefinitely. Belying the promise of the first two stanzas, it fails to elaborate connections, to tighten and complicate the web of meaning. The reason fOT this diffuseness is inherent in the antiintellectualist position expounded in the opening stanza: UNrVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1987 LOUIS MAC NEICE 541 Our half-thought thoughts divide in sifted wisps Against the basic facts repattemed without pause, I can no more gather my mind up in my fist Than the shadow of the smoke of this train upon the grass This is the way that animals' lives pass.2 The situation is one of impasse, the poet's response a confession of impotence. 'The train's rhythm,' transmitting the regularity of a senseless world, 'never relents.' 'The smoke makes broken queries in the air,' irrelevantly; mind cannot penetrate the density of 'basic facts;' its patterns of meaning are necessarily insubstantial and evanescent. The final stanza 's speculative introduction of 'further syntheses to which ... people at last attain' is as perfunctory as the language is drab - a token gesture made without conviction. Such scepticism would seem to forfeit poetry's traditional claims to confer shape and meaning on experience; if this were the case, Scarfe's opinion of the early work would not be too severe. But before the end of the thirties MacNeice was modifying such disavowals and rmding other ways of dealing with the impasse. In making his judgment Scarfe, in any case, overvalued 'single-mindedness': there are other kinds of clarity. If inability to make up his mind was responsible for the lack offocus in many of MacNeice's early poems, it also gave rise, and with increasing frequency , to poems of a lucid agnosticism; the difference is between confusion and indecision on the one hand and a deeply examined, fullyarticulated ambivalence on the other. MacNeice's best poetry is always, as he recognized, a poetry of 'paradox and antinomy...