BOOKS
135
WORDS AND THINGS
COLLECTED POEMS 1925-1948. By Louis MocNeice. Oxford University
Press (distributor). $6.00.
NEW AND SELECTED POEMS. By Howord Nemerov. Phoenix Books.
$1.95.
PREAMBLES AND OTHER POEMS. By Alvin Feinmen. Oxford University
Press. $3.75.
By the time MacNeice began to publish, a revolution had
already taken place. His first collection,
Blind Fireworks,
appeared in
1929, a year before Auden's debut; and his second, more significant
Poems,
in 1935. After the rigors of Pound, Eliot and Hart Crane, the
poetry of the thirties initiated a period of consolidation and leveling.
What one feels strongly in reviewing MacNeice's career is his tolerance
for all kinds of verse, his wish to return to surface simplicities, and his
desire to remove from contemporary poetry the stigmas of estheticism
and obscurity. Poetry, he once said, is the way we return to normalcy.
The world may be a problem, but words, on the whole, are not: art is
communication, its only asceticism is that of craft, and the poet is an
ordinary human being. These modest proposals were formulated, of
course, with an eye to more than the dangers of art for art's sake. They
also reflect an opposite pressure on writers of the thirties: to commit
themselves to political verse. To walk this tightrope between pure and
impure poetry was MacNeice's doom, and it results in a subdued re–
jection of all absolutes:
One place is as good as another.
Go
back
where your instincts call
And listen to the crying of the town-cats and the
taxis again,
Or wind your grammaphone and eavesdr.op on great
men.
His poetry is indeed this shifting from place to place. Verses,
some very wonderful and humane, appear on every subject: Ireland,
Iceland, England, Spain, America. . . . And what he writes is always
true in sentiment and honest in words. Too honest perhaps. For how
strange that he is never extreme in words or extreme in sentiment. As
one of our first academic poets, he did not escape the modern curse
of reflectiveness, though he constantly wrote against it. His poetry is
primarily the cultured journalism of a specialist in empathy: thoughts,
opmlOns, feelings-for, chatter, observations.
It
domesticates with the
heart, as Coleridge would have said; and it can repose, of course, on
