‘Any Dark Saying’: Louis MacNeice in the Nineteen Fifties

The contours of Louis MacNeice's career are rarely contested: from the high point of his nineteen thirties work, reaching a crescendo with Autumn Journal (1939), he drifted into a slump, reaching a nadir with two collections from the early nineteen fifties, Ten Burnt Offerings (1952) and Autumn Sequel (1954), before reviving to develop a startling new style at the end of the decade. The historical moment clearly demanded stylistic renegotiation, both for poets living in Ireland and those outside it, but in comparison with the new styles developed coterminously by Clarke and Kavanagh, MacNeice's late work is stark, suggestive of nightmarish solipsism and a breakdown of social cohesion. If the failure of his volumes from the early Fifties suggested a symbolic break between self and society, his subsequent inward turn affirms the self as the ground of lyric poetry. MacNeice's late work should be understood as symptomatic of an encroaching dissolution of communality that would profoundly affect the cultures of both islands as the twentieth century progressed. This essay explores MacNeice's stylistic evolution at mid century and considers the extent to which these developments were an essential foundation for the creation of his remarkable late style.