As editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review, I have assembled a special issue devoted to one of my favorite British poets, Louis MacNeice:

Just as Ben Jonson bore the unfortunate fate of living in what would become known as the “Age of Shakespeare,” Louis MacNeice lives in the long shadow thrown by his exact contemporary, W.H. Auden, who dominated his generation of poets and gave a name to the “Age of Anxiety” (Auden’s book of that title begat a symphony by Leonard Bernstein, secured a Pulitzer Prize for the recently naturalized poet, and was hailed by the New York Public Library as one of the most influential books of the last century). Together they suffered the temporary indignity of being joined as ingredients of “MacSpaunday,” the belittling coinage devised by critic Roy Campbell in his book Flowering Rifle. He amalgamated the names of the four Oxford “thirties poets” who were frequently, and unfairly, thought of as indistinguishable (anti-modernist in poetics, leftist in politics): Louis MacNeice (”Mac”), Stephen Spender (”sp”), W. H. Auden (”au-n”), and Cecil Day-Lewis (”day”).

It has become increasingly clear in recent decades that MacNeice, once consigned to the lower three-quarters of this composite caricature, has much more to offer than those who comprise the bottom half. Spender will likely be remembered largely on the strength of his mid-life memoir World Within World, though he proved peerless when posing in the role of dapper English poet, whether taking tea at an English lawn party or more potent tipples at lunch with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (in some quarters, his fabulous lifestyle earned him the derisive label “toady,” and, a real stinger, the “Rupert Brooke of the Depression”). Cecil Day-Lewis is still thought of as a charming but not terribly important poet, remembered for his honest and ironic reworking of Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (which most readers will recognize by its first line, “Come, live with me and be my love”) and his translations of Virgil’s Georgics and Aeneid.

MacNeice is a separate case, and, while relegated to second place in the pantheon of English “thirties poets,” he is a much closer second than had earlier been imagined. In fact, it seems that if there is a chasm dividing the talents of his generation MacNeice stands on the same rim as Auden, waving to the remaining two across the way.

To read the rest of the introduction, click here.

Share This

Sunil Iyengar interviews Jon Stallworthy on his biography of Louis MacNeice for the new MacNeice issue of the Contemporary Poetry Review:

Jon Stallworthy’s blood quickened after a poetry reading he gave earlier this year, not because he admired his own recitative powers, but because of something an audience member told him. This man, who turned out to be Stephen Spender’s nephew, had found a sheaf of letters in his late mother’s attic. His mother was Nancy Spender, Stephen’s sister-in-law, and it seems that she had maintained correspondence with her former lover, Louis MacNeice, long after their relationship had cooled. As MacNeice’s literary executor and official biographer, Stallworthy had known of the possible existence of some letters, but after the breakup of Nancy Spender’s first marriage, those had gone missing.

The letters her son found were different. They had been written between her two marriages, at the start of World War II. During this period, MacNeice was in America, chasing Eleanor Clark, a short-story writer to whom he wrote some of his most revealing correspondence, and getting reacquainted with his former wife Mary. The few dozen letters to Nancy Spender are “very entertaining and interesting about America,” Stallworthy says in a recent phone interview. They portray “his sense of what was happening at the outbreak of the war and how Americans were viewing the war,” he adds. “Even more so in the second half of the correspondence.” And what of Nancy’s letters to Louis? Her side of the exchange is missing only “because MacNeice kept nothing. Auden’s letters he would have put in the bin immediately. But the letters to her give you a very good sense of what she was saying to him, and they are very warm, humorous and thoroughly nice letters.”

To read the full interview, click here.

Share This

The long-awaited wedding between E-Verse’s very own Ernest Hilbert and and lovely Lynn occurred this past weekend on a gorgeous Philadelphia day with a lively crowd of participants. One of these participants, an E-Verse favorite Keith Kelleher, presented the following performance for the couple. There’s a few clips from the day sprinkled throughout. We’re promising more to come once the couple returns from their honeymoon in Greece. - Paul

Click To Play

Share This

A long-time E-Verser ties a bandanna over her face and sends in Top Five “Good” Thieves (i.e., thieves who are revered as heroes, or anti-heroes, by lots of people):

5. The guys who pulled off the Great Train Robbery of 1963
4. Bonnie & Clyde
3. Butch & Sundance
2. Jesse James
1. Robin Hood