Artist of exile and loss

Louis MacNeice Centenary 1907-1963: As the celebration of the great poet's life and work continues in Belfast, Literary Correspondent Eileen Battersbyassesses the legacy of the prolific Louis MacNeice, the true heir of Yeats

A small group stand in a beautiful churchyard, three young men, three poets visiting the grave of another poet, a master whose life was short but whose work influenced them all. In time, one of them would write a poem commemorating the occasion, a poem so good that the other two will concede that the defining poem has been written. Louis MacNeice remains the true heir of Yeats. He shared the Yeatsian vision, he understood the Anglo-Irish middle-class Protestant culture juxtaposed with the lure of the west that had created Yeats, because it had also created him.

On that day in 1963 when Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney honoured MacNeice (who had died nine days short of his 56th birthday), they were all young. Now they are older than MacNeice was when he died. Today they will stand again together in Carrowdore churchyard, on the glorious Ards Peninsula, at that grave, in the centenary of MacNeice's birth.

His influence endures - look to the work of Mahon in particular and Paul Muldoon. MacNeice was a highly sophisticated, major 20th-century poet of metaphysical seriousness and subtle wit, alert to the senses as well as the intellect. Yeats's "centre cannot hold" is MacNeice's "drunkenness of things various". Not Irish enough for the Irish, insufficiently English for the English, he travelled alone while being part of the Oxford 1930s generation. If the Irish saw MacNeice as an English poet and one of the Auden set, the English were equally suspicious. To them, or at least to critics such as Stephen Spender, he was a stylist and insufficiently romantic - or perhaps that should be insufficiently romantic in the Wordsworthian sense - because he was seen to hide behind his technique.

MacNeice did pay a price for his technical virtuosity. But he was caught between more than two cultures; he inhabited cultures within cultures. Born in Belfast to parents who had been raised near Clifden in Connemara, MacNeice saw himself as an exile from the west of Ireland. The west was the first of his "dream worlds", a world whose loss he lamented before he ever knew it.

The outsider theme determined his identity and dominated his work. In common with Yeats, MacNeice - an intellectual, a classicist - was preoccupied with his own past; it became an obsession as well as a rich source for his poetry. "But I cannot deny my past to which my self is wed/ The woven figure cannot undo its thread (Valediction, from Poems, 1935).

There was also his notion of loss: the early death of his mother, the collapse of his first marriage (his wife left him for another) and, all the while, the sense of having lost his country.

IRELAND BECAME LOST to him, as he was sent away to school in England and later to university at Oxford, where he seemed to become an English poet. His education was entirely English, so no wonder he regarded himself as a life exile. His lost Ireland stalked his consciousness:

The glamour of the end attic, the smell of old

Leather trunks - Perdita, where have you been

Hiding all these years? Somewhere or other a green

Flag is waving under an iron vault

And a brass bell is the herald of green country

And the wind is in the wires and the broom is gold.

(Perdita, from Autumn Journal, 1939)

He would continue to work within the dual themes of personal and public loss. Yet whereas Yeats looked to the Ireland that was shaping around his life, MacNeice responded to the public by considering the horrors of the second World War and placed much of his experience within English and London settings. This sense of Irish Irishness is drawn from his early Belfast and Carrickfergus memories and is balanced with his Englishness, which he explores from his schooldays at Marlborough and later at Oxford University and on to his emerging literary career from the 1930s onwards. Each of these many informing layers is described in his atmospheric, albeit incomplete, memoir, The Strings are False, which follows his story as far as 1941 and was published posthumously in 1965. He was always to see poetry as a drama. He committed the unthinkable; he challenged the concept of "lyric". For him, "drama" was far more important - a poem was a drama. An essay, Experiences With Images (1949), is more than a personal artistic manifesto, it explains the function of lyric poetry:

In fact all lyric poems, though in varying degrees, are dramatic - and that in two ways. (1) The voice and mood, though they may pretend to be spontaneous, are yet in even the most "personal" of poets such as Catullus and Burns a chosen voice and mood, set defiantly in opposition to what they must still co-exist with; there may be only one actor on the stage but the Opposition are on their toes in the wings - and crowding the auditorium; your lyric in fact is a monodrama. (2) Even in what is said (apart from the important things unsaid) all poems, though again in varying degrees, contain an internal conflict, cross-talk, back wash, come back or pay off. This is often conveyed by sleight of hand - the slightest change of tone, a heightening or lowering of diction, a rhythmical shift or jump of ideas. Hence all poems, as well as and because of being dramatic are ironic (in the old Greek sense of "dramatic irony"); poet and reader both know, consciously or unconsciously, the rest of the truth which lurks between the lines. And finally the lyric, which is thus dramatic and ironic, is also - it should go without saying - from the first and, above all, symbolic.

This is where MacNeice soars; his grasp of the fundamental meaning, expression and purpose of poetry informs his work and our response to it.

FEW POETS POSSESS such articulate candour. There is also humour and a willingness to make sense of things. There is no performance in a MacNeice poem; instead it is as if we are being made privy to a particular experience and sensation as well as a subsequent understanding of it. Throughout his career he would ponder a set store of themes, his familiars, yet he did find variations for the expression of such enduring preoccupations.

There was also, it must be admitted, a mid-career lull. He was an academic, witness, essayist, journalist and radio dramatist as well as a poet who wrote a great deal, even too much, yet this poet who began well, ended brilliantly, powerfully, as is evident from Solstices (1961) and The Burning Perch (1963).

It is ironic, considering his cosmopolitan flair, that his strength lies in his often ignored Irishness, that essential Belfast practicality and an abiding awareness of life's darkness. It confers an extra edge, at times an extra dimension, to his work. Here is a man who may have doubted but never forgot either home or the truths he had once learnt. "The truisms flew and perched on his shoulders/ And a tall tree sprouted from his father's grave." (The Truisms, from Solstices, 1961). A poem such as The Taxis acquires its additional sinister menace through the inspired use of a child's chant. This is life and death in trade-off with the devil:

In the first taxi he was alone tra-la,

No extras on the clock. He tipped ninepence

But the cabby, while he thanked him, looked askance

As though to suggest someone had bummed a ride.

In the second taxi he was alone tra-la

But the clock showed sixpence extra; he tipped

according

And the cabby from out his muffler said: 'Make sure

You have left nothing tra-la between you.'

In the third taxi he was alone tra-la

But the tip-up seats were down and there was an extra

Charge of one-and-sixpence and an odd

Scent that reminded him of a trip to Cannes.

As for the fourth taxi, he was alone

Tra-la when he hailed it but the cabby looked

Through him and said: "I can't tra-la well take

So many people, not to speak of the dog."

(The Taxis, from The Burning Perch, 1963)

Even as early as Mayfly, which was written between 1929 and 1934, MacNeice was considering the darker realities:

Nor put too much on the sympathy of things,

The dregs of drink, the dried cups of flowers,

The pathetic fallacy of the passing hours

When it is we who pass them - hours of stone,

Long rows of granite sphinxes looking on.

He evokes mood with an unsettling immediacy:

Here in Hampstead I sit late

Nights which no one shares and wait

For the phone to ring or for

Unknown angels at the door;

Better were the Northern skies

Than this desert in disguise . . .

(Postscript to Iceland,

from The Earth Compels)

The prose writer with whom MacNeice has most in common must be George Orwell - both men understood and feared the times during which they lived, and looked to politics with similar measures of concern, dread and disillusionment. In this, there is also that kinship with Yeats. MacNeice the critic wrote a fine study of Yeats in 1941 and it is no coincidence that many of the insights in it are drawn from MacNeice's obvious identification with the older poet. In ways he may as well have been writing about himself - and perhaps he was.

LAST SPRING, AT the Poetry Now Festival in Dún Laoghaire, on an unusually sunny afternoon, a group of poets sat together and read MacNeice. It was one of the best literary events I have ever attended. It was also far more than a session of MacNeice's greatest hits. The poets conveyed their admiration for MacNeice in a way that made it exciting and unnervingly moving for the audience. Published poets, including the great Michael Longley, sat in a row, gleeful at the riches. It was Longley who spoke of MacNeice's "most wonderful variety". And it was he who read, most beautifully, Derek Mahon's tender elegy to MacNeice, In Carrowdore Churchyard. Recalling the day he had stood at the grave with Mahon and Heaney, "all contemplating elegies", Longley evoked the moment and the image of the three young poets. He also quoted his own comments made in an introduction to MacNeice's Selected Poems: "What other 20th-century poet writing in English explores with such persistence and brilliance all that being alive can mean? Perhaps only Yeats."

It is true. Because it is MacNeice who looked to Yeats and, not only understood him but shared his vision.

The Louis MacNeice Centenary Conference and Celebration continues today in Queen's University Belfast. For further details see www.qub.ac.uk/heaneycentre