The Columbia History of British Poetry (158 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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Page 612
Thus "the country and the city" in British Isles literature is partly a question of relations between England and the rest.
Williams's movement from rural Welsh village to the English city parallels, in historical and ideological contours, the transitions of Louis MacNeice. Brought up in the small town of Carrickfergus near Belfast but schooled at Marlborough and Oxford, MacNeice was the poet from the Celtic countries who most centrally shared in and shaped English "thirties" poetry, with its stress on assimilating the city. Whereas, for Auden, the city symbolizes civilization, the forum of rational discourse and "new styles of architecture," MacNeice gives it sensory and social presence in poems such as "Birmingham":
                        the streets run away between the proud glass of shops,
Cubical scent bottles artificial legs arctic foxes and electric mops,
But beyond this centre the slumward vista thins Eke a diagram:
There, unvisited, are Vulcan's forges who doesn't care a tinker's damn.
Derek Mahon has said that "the pre-war urban England of rainy tramlines, Corner Houses, Bisto Kids and Guinness is Good for You could probably be roughly simulated from a reading of [Graham] Greene and MacNeice." But although
Autumn Journal
(1939), a summation of the 1930s in the context of Munich, is inter alia a great "London" poem, MacNeice's response to the city goes beyond reportage or social criticism. Urban images and speech patterns are internal to his poetic structures. At the same time, less aligned than Auden with metropolitan or national authority, MacNeice holds in tension the knowable community and "Vulcan's forges." In "Western Landscape'' (1945) he terms himself "a bastard / Out of the West by urban civilization." His poem "The Hebrides" makes these Scottish islands the locus of wider conflict between the utopian and dystopian elements in traditional culture, and between such culture and destructive flux. On the one hand, "the art of being a stranger with your neighbor / Has still to be imported"; on the other, "many live on the dole or on old-age pensions / And many waste with consumption and some are drowned. . . ." This is also a dialectic about imaginative focus and literary coordinates. In
Autumn Journal
XVI MacNeice represents a larger island, Ireland, as at once archaically insular ("Let the round tower stand aloof / In a world of bursting mortar!") and enticingly "small enough / To be still thought of with a family feeling." Thus the knowable community translates into a poem's cognitive horizonsthe aesthetic island facing the historical flux.
 
Page 613
How knowable a community, how firm a horizon, is the nation? How does it affect the context within which poetry is conceived and received? MacNeice's criticism of the Irish Free State for opting out of European crisis contravenes not only Nationalist isolationism, but the literary boundaries set by Yeats. Yeats's construction of an Irish national literature, although contested by later Irish canon makers, has been paradigmatic for writers elsewhere who dispute the hegemony of Eliot's "powerful capital." Edwin Muir wrote in 1934:
There is now . . . an increasing public prepared to give a special welcome to Scottish work, and that is quite a new state of things, and provides for the first time for a century the possible conditions of a literary revival. But this is probably the most that can be said: there is a great deal of literary activity in Scotland; there is no Scottish literary movement to compare with the Irish movement whose chief figure was Mr. W. B. Yeats.
The argument between Muir and MacDiarmid over the strength and continuity of Scottish literary traditions is paradigmatic, too. But it should be prefaced by a reminder of Yeats's own difficulties with Nationalism, as opposed to nationality. His literary and cultural Nationalism was stimulated but (aesthetically) repelled, by the patriotic ballads of the nineteenth-century political movement, Young Ireland. The Irish literary revival came under fire from sterner Republicans than Yeats; from proponents of the Irish language; and from the Catholic Church. And after the 1916 Rising, which ultimately led to the foundation of the Free State, Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory:
At the moment I feel that all the work of years has been overturned, all the bringing together of classes, all the freeing of Irish literature and criticism from politics.
From the mid-1920s, when Hugh MacDiarmid began "writing in Scots and conducting my anti-English propaganda," as he puts it in
Lucky Poet
(1943), he was determined to attach Scottish literature and criticism to the politics of Scottish Nationalism. Muir greatly admired MacDiarmid's Scots poetry, he loathed both the kailyard and Scottish writers who processed Scotland for an English audience (two sides of the same coin), and he was no less anxious than MacDiarmid for a Scottish literary revival. But Muir could not believe in the reality of a more general project to reconnect contemporary poetry with Dunbar and the makars.
 
Page 614
For MacDiarmid, the Reformation as much as the Union was a foreign imposition to be thrown off by the nascent Scottish literary spirit, which would prove itself unbroken. For Muir, Calvinism was a self-mutilating theology embraced by a self-mutilating people who had connived in their own destruction, their poetry-crushing philistinism. The Scottish literary tradition could not help but be sporadic, since John Knox had "robbed Scotland of all the benefits of the Renaissance":
We with such courage and the bitter wit
To fill the ancient oak of loyalty
And strip the peopled hill and the altar bare
And crush the poet with an iron text,
How could we read our souls and learn to be?
                                            ("Scotland 1941")
Muir's tone here seems self-mutilating, too. It echoes the touch of Calvinist determinism or masochism in the thinking behind his controversial
Scott and Scotland
(1936), published after a disappointing return home:
Scottish literature as such will disappear, and London will become quite literally the capital of the British Isles . . . "Hugh MacDiarmid" will become a figure like Burnsan exceptional case, that is to sayan arbitrary apparition of the national genius, robbed of his legitimate effect because there will be no literary tradition to perpetuate it.
MacDiarmid read
Scott and Scotland
as craven surrender to the quisling hegemony of Anglo-Scots. The rift between the poets was never healed.
In fact the same bleak diagnosis, the same sense of national absence, impelled Muir and MacDiarmid towards different, Calvinistic extremesliterary extinction, and literary millennium. Andrew Noble, in his excellent introduction to Muir's
Uncollected Scottish Prose
(1982) calls the two poets "opposites who did not attract." As negations rather than contraries, they forwent the dialectic that Muir himself saw as essential to Scottish intellectual progress. There was little creative, tradition-building interaction between their positions. As it is, their poetry runs out of cultural and formal frameworks, structures that mediate between the self and the universe. At its worst, MacDiarmid's poetry becomes all self, a solipsistic aggrandizement; Muir's becomes all universe. These strictures do not apply to MacDiarmid's great achieve-

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