Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) was a contradictory figure. He was an
Irishman educated in England, where he spent most of his adult life; a
rector's son who became a skeptic; a poet, a travel writer, a dramatist
for the BBC, a critic and a memorialist. He lectured in Classics and had
a penchant for modernism; he was friends with W. H. Auden, Stephen
Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis, yet remained unorthodox within the
'Auden group'; a 'Thirties poet,' he leaned left but never joined the
Communist Party; he fed on W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, the better to
come into his own. The Burning Perch, MacNeice's last and posthumous
collection, combines the poet's various influences and concerns into a
remarkably consistent, however paradoxical, personal project: a quest
for poetic renewal and a perennial past. Embers or ashes, nightmare
visions or ironic pictures, dramatic parables or simple limericks, these
and many other varieties of dissonance come together in a ceaseless
weave of archaized novelty and modernized memories. Through
minute analysis of precise poems, this study shows how MacNeice's
music of disharmony succeeds in finding its own voice, which not to
be false, must achieve a muted singing.
