Parable

Abstract The centrality of the idea of parable to MacNeice’s writing is clear, and was often insisted upon by the poet himself, especially in his later years. The nature of this idea, however, is more difficult to clarify, and even MacNeice found ‘parable’ an awkwardly wide term for critical analysis; yet ‘a kind of double-level writing, or, if you prefer it, sleight-of-hand’ is at the heart of much of his post-war work. This ‘parable’, for MacNeice, concentrates elements that had always been of crucial importance-identity, the limits of self, the experience of time-but does so by existing in a context that compounds the contemporary with longer mythic and literary perspectives, and ultimately with those of deep personal memory. The notion of parable and its implications change for MacNeice in the course of his career: the present chapter examines certain points in this development, and attempts to make clearer the contexts against which MacNeice’s parable is defined as well as those upon which it tends to draw.