THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

after his graduation from Oxford. ‘Birmingham’ is made up of a series of fragmentary impressions of railway
cuttings, of cars, of factories, and of half timbered suburban houses with ‘lips pressed | So tightly and eyes staring at
the traffic through bleary haws | And only a six-inch grip of the racing earth in their concrete claws’. In ’Woods’,
published in Holes in the Sky in 1948, he acknowledges a distinction between his father’s relish for empty Irish
moorland and his own for the woodlands of the ‘tame’ English landscape. The woods are romantically ‘packed with
birds and ghosts’ but they are not like the wilds of Mayo, ‘they are assured | Of their place by men; reprieved from the
neolithic night | By gamekeepers or by Herrick’s girls at play’. A similar feel for a lush and varied English West
Country, an archaeological landscape haunted by historical and literary associations, shapes Wessex Guidebook,
published in MacNeice’s last volume The Burning Perch (1963). The land is historically endowed with memories of
Roman emperors and English kings, but it is also a place where the local measurement of time is erased by villagers
who forget the church clock ‘in deference to Big Ben’. The indifference of Time to men, and of men to history in the
last stanza takes on a deliberate and appropriately Hardyan tone:
But hindmost, topmost, those illiterate seasons
Still smoke their pipes in swallow-hole and hide-out
As scornful of the tractor and the jet
As of the Roman road, or axe of flint,
Forgotten by the mass of human beings
Whom they, the Seasons, need not even forget
Since, though they fostered man, they never loved him.
MacNeice recognized his own contradictions as an artist in the external manifestations of human history, in
smokestacks as much as in ploughmarks. The remarkable thematic consistency of his poetry emerges from a process
of questioning and balancing those contradictions.
When W. H. Auden paid posthumous tribute to MacNeice he remarked on his friend’s pleasure in ‘language, in
country landscapes, in city streets and parks, in birds beasts and flowers, in nice clothes, good conversation, good
food, good drink, and in what he called „the tangles”’. These transient,
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temporal pleasures, tangles and all, are reflected in Auden’s own verse. Auden, whose precocity of talent was evident
in his first volume of 1930, is, however, a far more affirmative poet. The nature of his affirmation shifted as he
gradually moved, in charted stages, from a Marxist alignment to a Christian one. When he removed himself to the
United States in 1939 and took out US citizenship in 1946 he regarded both as decisive breaks with his personal,
political, and literary pasts (though he returned to Britain at the end of his life). In his middle age he became a
determined pruner and reviser of what he had come to regard as the excesses and infelicities of his poetic youth, first
tampering with, then declining to reprint certain published poems. The most notable of these revisions and
suppressions concern the poem ‘September 1, 1939’, a work which he later disdained as ‘a hangover from the U.K.’
and one ‘infected with an incurable dishonesty’. ‘September 1, 1939’ was specifically transatlantic both in its setting
(‘I sit in one of the dives | On Fifty-Second Street’) and in its first appearance in the American journal New Republic,
but it strains to undo a tangle which is essentially European. The date of its title is that of Hitler’s invasion of Poland,
two days before the consequent precipitation of Britain into the Second World War; the focus of its argument lies,
however, in a declaration of independence from the ‘State’ and of an alternate dependence on human relationships
(‘We must love one another or die ... May I, composed like them | Of Eros and of dust ... Show an affirming flame’).
Having left his native island, Auden, the inveterate commender of islands, was now attempting to proclaim himself
part of a continent.
It is possible that what Auden later recognized as the ‘incurable dishonesty’ of the poem lay in its very attempt to
deny the significance of the insular. ‘The whole talent, the whole genius of Auden’, Stephen Spender remarked in
1970, ‘has been never to be a central figure. He’s a central figure on the margin.’ That ‘margin’ is perhaps best
typified by Auden’s fondness for the role of an observer of islands. In this role he explores geographical and spiritual
detachment from the mainland or the mass and, as his later interest in the Christian existentialism of Kierkegaard
also suggests, he allows individual freedoms to take precedence over the demands of the community. The Poems of
1930 (which were revised, expanded, and excised in 1933) reflect, if not on islands, at least on a landscape of
alienation peopled by strangers. This alienation is derived from a Marxist perception of the decay of late capitalist
society, from a Freudian approach to psychic disorder, and from a relation of both to the imagined landscapes of The
Waste Land. All human relationships evoked in the poems are conditioned by the reiterated imagery of invasions,
conquests, sentries, spies, and frontiers. As Auden’s verse developed in the later 1930s, however, geography took on a
fresh significance. The title of the 1936 volume, Look, Stranger!, derived by its publishers from the opening line of