it's Blind. But you can Feel It...

Louis MacNeice
( 1907 –63 ), Blind Fireworks, Poems, Letters from Iceland, The Earth Compels, Autumn Journal

Though MacNeice's precocious first book, Blind Fireworks ( 1929 ), attracted little attention, he emerged in the early 1930s as a bright, sharp, intelligent, and sophisticated poet. He was conventionally ranked with his Oxford contemporaries Auden , Day Lewis , and Spender —and indeed often continues to be so ranked—but it should now be possible to see him in better perspective, relating him more interestingly to his Northern Irish background and upbringing, for example. His father was a senior clergyman in the Church of Ireland, a strict and brooding presence over the son, who often seems to have felt more at home in the less puritanical south of the island. Nevertheless, one has to bear in mind MacNeice's inherited, if deflected, notions of account-books and duty. There is also the fact of his conventional English public-school and Oxford education, in which he was both the rebel and the dandy.

Poems ( 1935 ), MacNeice's contributions to Letters from Iceland (prose and verse, written with Auden, 1937 ), and The Earth Compels ( 1938 ) all contain attractive and memorable poems and lines. But it was Autumn Journal ( 1939 ), written during the Munich crisis, that most brilliantly captures the essence of the best of MacNeice, not in miniature but at length. He had already shown a gift for sensing the temper of the time in such poems as ‘An Eclogue for Christmas’ (‘I meet you in an evil time’) and ‘Bagpipe Music’ (‘It's no go the merrygoround, it's no go the rickshaw’). Autumn Journal discursively reacts to the events of the moment, to his own public and private responses, and catches them all in a colloquial, flexible, argumentative, and yet relaxed mode which (as John Press has remarked) reminds one of Byron's Don Juan .