MACNEICE AND THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MODE

During the 1960s Auden lamented, ‘It is a sad fact […] that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it’. Though this suggests a reluctance to write criticism, the poets of the 1930s were keen to theorize their work especially during that decade. As one commentator quips, ‘It almost seems as if the main task of many poets was to make an assertion about the poet's function, rather than to perform that function’. Economics may underlie this eagerness, but the fact remains that the literature of the period provides several ‘defences of poetr’: MacNeice, Spender and Day Lewis each made their own contributions to the genre. MacNeice's description of his ideal poet, in Modern Poetry, has been widely quoted as a shorthand sketch of a ‘typical’ 1930s poet. It also tells us much about MacNeice himself and his relationship with his contemporaries:

MacNeice recalls similar statements by Auden. The caution about esoteric poets glances towards the intimidating figure of W. B. Yeats, and echoes Auden's argument, outlined in his Introduction to The Oxford Book of Light Verse (1938), that the modern poet should reject post-Romantic ideas of ‘pure poetr’ in favour of writing which engages directly with the concerns of ‘a genuine community’. MacNeice's poet seems to embody this egalitarian fantasy. He is someone palpably plugged into the ‘real’ world, whose attributes stress a zest for living, alongside intellectual curiosity. Being ‘informed in economics’ and ‘appreciative of women’ are equally important to this sociable and empathetic poet.

Though this last phrase may strike twenty-first-century readers as hopelessly dated, with its assumption that ‘the poet’ must be male and the implication that ‘he’ will be heterosexual, it signals MacNeice's divergence from Audenesque attitudes.