Louis MacNeice's Struggle with Aristotelian Ethics

Louis MacNeice's Struggle with Aristotelian Ethics

A beginning student of poetry coming across the published scholarship on Louis MacNeice would likely be surprised at the debate over that poet's relation to his times. This hypothetical student would probably have first encountered MacNeice's work either in a handful of gleefully nominalist lyrics, such as the 1935 "Snow" and "Sunlight in the Garden," or in the journalistic ruminations on man, politics, history, and nation that constitute his Autumn Journal (1938). If the student started with "Snow" and similar poems, he or she might wonder how MacNeice could be considered anything but an heir to the Aesthetics movement; but if AutumnJournal was the starting point, the student would doubt whether if there was any poet of the period who more vividly engaged the ethical significance of fascism and Marxism, of Roman, Russian, and Spanish politics. In that long poem MacNeice, the scholar and professor of Classics, deploys Aristotelian concepts to address the uncertainties of prewar Europe. Its cantos betray a ubiquitous concern for the relation of persons to their historical community and the possible moral responsibility that relation may entail. Autumn Journal's registered ambivalence has been more attended to than its Aristotelian pedigree, and so the debate over MacNeice's political stance continues.

Two recent contributors to this debate, Edna Longley and Heather Clarke, have argued that MacNeice's poetry, and MacNeice the man, were embedded and engagés in a number of ways.¹ Longley agitates for MacNeice's restoration as a specifically Irish poet, against the view of Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, and others, that MacNeice "withdrew" from Ireland or at least could not speak adequately to its conditions.² More recently, Clarke has narrated MacNeice's career as a committed "propagandista" in London during the Blitz; in her reading, he becomes not a model of the artist paring his nails above a devastating war but the pragmatic, responsible, and ostensibly patriotic Anglo-Irish voice of an England under siege.³

In both accounts, MacNeice stands magnified as a better poet than his 1930s cohorts, Spender and Day-Lewis, and as a more quintessentially political one than the sometime Marxist Auden. Such readings are enlightening, but leave unanswered—indeed, unanalyzed—the criteria by which one might designate a poem as superficial or aesthetic, as politically committed or ethically engaged. Too much literary scholarship uses this terminology, without even implicitly offering definitions.⁴ A systematic assessment of the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in MacNeice's work remains unwritten, despite the poet's own obsession with the matter; his work on Yeats, for example, should stand as one of the corrective texts for interpretations of any historical correspondences between high Modernist theories of the lyric and the ethos of totalitarianism. A full exegesis of MacNeice's poems must not simply observe the ethical concepts running through them. It must also regard ethics—and the foundation of ethics in a sociology, or a philosophy of the person—as the fulcrum on which MacNeice's poems turn. Though it is admittedly unfashionable to say so, ethics and sociology provided the schema in which MacNeice articulated his role as an Irish poet educated and living in Britain during a period of immense historical crisis.

MacNeice's frequently alleged "aestheticism" amounts to more than a belated inheritance from the fin-de-siècle or high Modernist poets. The supposed aesthetes of Oxford and Cambridge in the 1920s soon interwove their pretensions with the theories of Marx and Freud, among others. For such persons, "the aesthetic" effectively signified not the amoral or apolitical, nor an escape from ethics, but rather, the ethically embedded decision to eschew designations of good and evil. As Adorno proposed long ago regarding Kierkegaard, "the construction of the aesthetic" is in a particular way an ethical project.⁵ Even the most hermetically sealed lyrics in MacNeice's oeuvre, therefore, can be read as materials integral to...