Legacies of Romanticism by Casaliggi Carmen;March-Russell Paul;

Author:Casaliggi, Carmen;March-Russell, Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

A year before I read Eliot my favourite long poem was Prometheus Unbound but this had already cloyed; Shelley’s enthusiasms were beginning to seem naïve to a child of the Twentieth Century, even to a child who had only fleeting contacts with its over-industrialized, over-commercialized, over-urbanized, over-standardized, over specialized nuclei. What we wanted was ‘realism’ but—so the paradox goes on—we wanted it for romantic reasons. 6

MacNeice’s reminiscence about the nature of his formative poetic preoccupations suggests the paradoxical poetic drives in his work, where the “realist” and the “Romantic” function as opposite poles. Both exist within his work, despite MacNeice’s wish to purge his work of the “romantic reasons” for the existence of “realism”. Like W.B. Yeats, on whom MacNeice had written a challenging although approving study, MacNeice seems determined to distance himself from Shelley’s seductive, though dangerous, example by seeing his work as betraying a naïve meliorism. 7 Yet Shelley’s preoccupation with fissures, irony, and sceptical vision suggest a far more sophisticated form of poetic optimism than MacNeice’s remark would allow; as P.M.S. Dawson writes: “In only one of Shelley’s works can he be called a Utopian, and that is Queen Mab, which has been described as Godwin in verse, quite wrongly for it is really the least Godwinian of all Shelley’s major works”. 8 Owing to Shelley’s profound social engagement, the problem of creating a poem that can steer between the Scylla of simplistic optimism and the Charybdis of unrelenting pessimism became a major poetic concern for Shelley as he sought to explore reality without diminishing the claims of the human potential.

Richard Danson Brown characterises MacNeice in the thirties as “a young poet struggling between conflicting priorities and potential voices”. 9 Shelley’s balancing act between two strong personalities in Julian and Maddalo offered him an example of the opportunities open to the self-divided poet. MacNeice, like Shelley and Byron, 10 remained “bruised by exile”; he refused the Marxist politics of his contemporaries, and failed to assimilate fully into either English or Irish culture. 11 MacNeice suggests this schism in “Postscript to Iceland” as he, like Shelley, sketches a subtle division between the two poles of the self. Rather than rehearsing Shelley’s debate between optimism and pessimism, MacNeice balances a Don Juan-like witty and urbane speaker against a gloomily experienced Maddalo-like voice. Less loquacious than Auden in identifying himself explicitly with Byron, MacNeice found in him a similarly significant influence. 12

Both MacNeice and Auden make a bid for Byronic sensibility, although MacNeice’s understanding of the Byronic differs fundamentally from the levity of tone that Auden claims as the legacy of Byron’s poetry. 13 “Cock o’ the North” (1950–51) pays homage to a Byron undetectable in Auden’s witty and arch “Letter to Lord Byron” (1937) as MacNeice adopts Byron’s voice to hail him for his ethical strength, writing: “I will hae the courage o’ my fear / And blaze a path to silence” (CP 326). Viewing Byron as a serious defender of Greece as well as a poet, who can

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.