Abstract
The conclusion begins by discussing the modernist and socialist architect Berthold Lubetkin’s post-war plans for the Peterlee New Town Project, a projected miners’ utopia in County Durham. It goes on to discuss The Book of Demons as a work bruised by decades of political defeat, invested in complex fantasies of history. While Tony Blair was ‘modernising’ the Labour Party, MacSweeney was in and out of clinics for alcohol addiction. MacSweeney’s reaction to New Labour was to put on the iconography of the twentieth-century Left. With particular enthusiasm for Bolshevik visual art, MacSweeney laments over his ‘shattered socialist heart’. I read this late reassertion of political commitment alongside E.P. Thompson’s essay ‘Commitment and Poetry’. The conclusion ends with a reading of the long final poem of Demons, surveying the sites and themes of MacSweeney’s major works, ending with a reference to Paul Celan’s Meridian speech.
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