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What is one to think about MacNeice’s poetry? One likes so much of it, and yet when one gets down to some close reading it so often disappoints. I don’t really believe G. S. Fraser’s diagnosis of ‘evasive honesty’ is quite the answer. We shouldn’t expect the poet to give us everything. It would be embarrassing and boring, too. There is quite enough range in MacNeice (not to mention stamina, observation and technique) to judge him as second only to Auden of the poets of their generation. Yet finally, striking though they may be, so few of his poems achieve real poetic inevitability that one is almost tempted to label him from his own ‘Elegy for Minor Poets’ as one who ‘knew all the words but failed to achieve the Word’.

     Standard opinion of MacNeice in relation to the Thirties poets is favourable, it seems, because of his staying-power. As a pink liberal, the story goes, he had no political engagement to collapse at the outbreak of war, and now is the only one who really treats social themes, while Auden, Day-Lewis and Spender have turned to the inner life via the Church or Thomas Hardy. This theory ought to be scotched. The real bogey of the poet (any poet) is respectability, and Grigson was chastising Day-Lewis as early as 1937 for joining the Committee of the Book Society (see New Verse number 25). MacNeice has a wicked stepmother, too, and one which has had a more direct influence on his poetry than any publishing firm or magazine could have. The BBC is a medium as well as an administration, and it is quite obvious that the style and length of MacNeice’s work in the Fifties have been dictated a good deal by the exigencies of broadcasting.

     If one is to claim that it is this (rather than ‘evasive honesty’) which is the bad thing, it must be remembered that MacNeice made his reputation with the short lyric. His talent was sensual, pictorial, metaphysical. He wrote of moments of perception and vision, his insight into the variety of the world in its onslaught upon man’s sensibility:

While the lawn-mower sings moving up and down
Spirting its little fountain of vivid green,
I, like Poussin, make a still-bound fête of us
Suspending every noise, of insect or machine.

He wrote fluidly and boisterously in a way which brought him nearer to the target than many of his more accurate contemporaries. Perhaps this characteristic was the germ of the prolixity which is disappointing in some of his later work, but in the collections Poems (1935) and The Earth Compels (1938) it comes across merely as the expression of a sheer joy in getting the world on paper, ‘the drunkenness of things being various’:

Let the saxophones and the xylophones
And the cult of every technical excellence, the miles of canvas  in the
                                                                                           galleries
And the canvas of the rich man’s yacht snapping and tacking on the
                                                                                                 seas
And the perfection of a grilled steak —
Let all these so ephemeral things
Be somehow permanent like the swallow’s tangent wings . . .

These poems explode on the page (‘I have always admired the Chinese because they invented gunpowder only to make fireworks with it,’ he writes in the preface to his earliest book, Blind Fireworks, in 1929) and the explosions point the mood in which the observation was bred. Poems like ‘August’, ‘Morning Sun’ or ‘June Thunder’ have this vitality pure; the eclogues, say (a splendid revival of this traditional form), draw upon it for their firmness. It is his central strength.

     His perhaps best-known poem, Autumn Journal (1938) is not altogether successful as a long poem, because it is really a yoking together of many short ones. The journal form was typical of one who had claimed that ‘the poet is only an extension . . . of the ordinary man’ (New Verse 31/32). The poem has become a classic text of the Munich period, passive, observant, but with one eye fixed on the largest issues. It transcends the journalistic, rather in the way that a documentary film by Humphrey Jennings does. It is real and moving, and yet between the quoted passages, tending to strangle the insight and devalue the aperçus, is just too much lame writing, too many cliché images:

... at this hour of the day it is no good saying
        ‘Take away this cup’;
Having helped to fill it ourselves it is only logic
        That now we should drink it up.

It is a characteristic of this poem, and more especially of Autumn Sequel fifteen years later, that MacNeice’s search after illustrative material should be successful, but exhausting. By moving fast, he doesn’t fall off the rope (this especially of Autumn Sequel, written entirely in terza rima, and the tighter, cleverer Ten Burnt Offerings (1952)) but he leaves the reader breathless, cloyed, unsatisfied. Metaphors are extended, fatal rhetorical Cleopatras beckon and are followed: the energy and application are remarkable. Not so his inspiration.

     In contrast to Auden, whose long works are masterpieces of originality and artifice and whose short ones seem to get more and more prosy, MacNeice has retained a real poetic burst over the short distance. He never neglected the lyric entirely, and some of his wartime pieces like ‘Meeting Point’, ‘Entirely’ or ‘Neutrality’ are as good as ever. Only occasionally is one reminded of the real richness of the true war-poetry (the property of a succeeding generation, in fact) by a certain coldness in poems like ‘Nuts in May’ or ‘Bar-Room Matins’, a lack of accommodation of his smart style to the actuality that was presaged in the surrealist doom of ‘Bagpipe Music’:

Pretzels crackers chips and beer:
Death is something that we fear
But it titillates the ear.

The known poems of this period, ‘Prayer before Birth’, say, ‘The Trolls’ or ‘The Streets of Laredo’ need more to back them up than the kind of thing represented perhaps by a series of ‘Novelettes’, which, though containing the usual brilliant line or two (e.g. ‘long green grapes exploding on the palate’), seem in their context unaccountably tame, middlebrow and slick. The barrenness of post-war poetry was notoriously widespread; the relative dullness of MacNeice as he appears in the rest of the Collected Poems up to 1948 need hardly be remarked.

     MacNeice has never really been what one could call a polished poet. Even in the early days he was disparaging Empson (in New Verse No. 11: ‘The clever fellows must wait to show off some other day.’) and he indulges in some parody of that by then influential poet in Autumn Sequel (1954). He also laments the death of Dylan Thomas as ‘Gwylim’, one of the tiresomely pseudonymous characters that flit about in it without acquiring real interest. It is a pious work with only the scope and variety that one of 163 pages can rope in by its mere refusal to give up; the mood and flavour of its predecessor is lost. He tells us why he remained with the BBC after the war:

                  I could not discern
Much choice; it might in fact be better to give
Such service, better to bury than to burn.

I stayed. On my peacetime feet. There was little alternative.

‘Better to bury than to burn’: an epitaph indeed for fiery poet in his tomb of rhetoric. The feeling in the focal points of the poem are muddied with words. He has substituted for the old MacNeicean spark a kind of leaden ornateness:

His sister called and came upstairs and stood
Quietly and said quietly ‘We have lost
Gavin’; a cobra spread an enormous hood

Over the window and a sudden frost
Froze all the honey left in the looted hive
While the white Dove revoked his pentecost

Muting the tongues of fire.

     But if we have missed the gay importance of his youthful work, his latest collections have come nearest to recapturing it. Visitations (1958) relaxed into landscape and nostalgia. Solstices, as the title could imply, continues this development in reflection and poise. ‘Country Weekend’ focuses the fields of his memory and desire:

               Decant the oil,
Turn up the wick. Call it escape
Or what rude name you like — or call it
A good deed, rather a good night:
One good night in a naughty world.

Poems about childhood, firewatching, dreams or driving in the dark give us the poise in the strength of his imagination. The last is a familiar MacNeicean situation in the restlessness and luxury of its sensation. Here he begins strikingly and welds the whole into a strong poetic idea:

Through purblind night the wiper
Reaps a swathe of water
On the screen; we shudder on
     And hardly hold the road
All we can see a segment
Of blackly shining asphalt
With the wiper moving across it
     Clearing, blurring, clearing.

The car is the ‘now’ of life, hauling ‘the black future towards us’. It could be a symbol for MacNeice’s poetic life, sucking in experience under the axle, and spewing it behind him. This volume catches him at a moment of nourishment. The presence of real poetic ideas should always demand a sureness and lightness of touch. This lightness breeds strength in poems like ‘Country Weekend’, ‘The Riddle’ or ‘Reflections’. He can still rather coldly overstress his points (in ‘Apple Blossom’, perhaps, or ‘The Truisms’), but there is a sort of calm youthfulness in some of the poems (the two dreams, for instance) which is quite invigorating.

     Like Auden’s latest volume, Homage to Clio, Solstices is very readable, a little easy, a little diverse perhaps, but meatier than most that come one’s way, though MacNeice has nothing here to rival the wit and controlled tenderness of Auden. Solstices perhaps shares the unevenness of his wartime work (a quality almost inherent in the breadth and freedom of his writing) but it largely avoids the rhetorical stretches of the BBC period: it holds the road with skill and poise.