Epitaphs for Louis: Early Writings

Abstract

Abstract When it is read in the literary context of the mid-193os, MacNeice’s Poems begins to seem something of a public document. Yet the central images and ideas of the volume-of time, flux, petrifaction, and stasis, which in 19 35 took on topical associations-have their origin in distinctly private areas of the poet’s thought. The process of literary development towards Poems has a bearing on MacNeice’s development away from that volume. In order to bring the lines of continuity in the work into focus, it is necessary to start early, with the kind of writing that is often forgotten as ‘juvenilia’. No poet would ever wish to be judged on his earliest work; given that, the actual significance of juvenilia varies considerably from writer to writer. If some poets prefer such work to be given a quiet burial, there are others who find youthful productions, and mistakes, serviceable in the context of their mature careers. MacNeice belongs to this second category: the poetry of his early years, though for the most part dropped from the collected editions, has distinct relevance for his writings from the 1930s onwards. Indeed, MacNeice gave public burials to his early work with some regularity in his personal and discursive critical essays. The reasons for this have largely failed to engage the poet’s critics, but the juvenilia has enough inherent value to beof interest beyond the small circle of MacNeice’s scholars; this largely forgotten body of work casts a revealing light on the experience of the poetic ‘1930s generation’, the first ‘modern’ poets in England whose encounter with Modernism was, to use Eliot’s phrase for his generation’s reading of Shelley, ‘an affair of adolescence’.