MacNeice's Byzantium: The Ghosts of Yeats and Eliot in The Burning Perch

Abstract

Louis MacNeice's engagement with W. B. Yeats has attracted much critical attention, mainly focusing on the earlier part of MacNeice's career. The consensus is that Yeats's influence on MacNeice grew through the 1930s, but that the coming of the war forced him to re-evaluate Yeats's work and hence his own. It is also agreed that MacNeice's Irish literary identity can be established through his reception of Yeats. However, MacNeice continued to write in response to Yeats throughout his career. His later poetry is deeply engaged with the implications of Yeats's ideas, beyond those relating to his Irish identity; while it also explores these ideas through a tissue of allusions and echoes that extends beyond notions of influence. This essay outlines MacNeice's exploration of the Yeatsian terrain of Byzantium in his last collection, The Burning Perch (1963), as a means of challenging the use of history that underpins Yeats's symbolism. But in travelling to Byzantium, MacNeice also confronts T. S. Eliot, whose poetry and criticism offer another set of ideas about the past that are examined through echo and allusion. Indeed, by placing a Byzantine terrain in relation to the work of Eliot as well as Yeats, MacNeice's late poetry questions Modernism's historiography more generally, to offer an altogether more chastening position for the poet in relation to the past.