116
GEOFFREY H. HARTMAN
the example of the Horatian "sermon" and the verse-letter. But the
commitment seems finally to be to poems rather than to poetry. Except
for occasional flirtations:
Coral azalea and scarlet rhododendron
Syringa and pin-hors,e chestnut and laburnum
Solid as temples, niched with the sound of birds,
Widen the eye and nostrils, demand hommage of words.
And we have to turn from them, fit out an ethic
. . .
The result of so deliberate a turning away is a wry and modest poetry.
It
refuses to let us admire either its technique or the thoughts expressed
by that technique.
MacNeice's methodical halfwayness comes from trying to steer a
middle course between formalistic and utilitarian verse, but it may also
have to do with his basic attitude toward words. Though he is moved
by human degradation, he is rarely moved by the degradation of words.
His attitude toward words is still determined, of course, by his situation.
Surrounded by poets whom he considered to be greater, by Auden and
Spender as well as Eliot and Yeats, he made himself an identity of what
they lacked. In his eyes their greatest weakness was a residual hankering
after the prophetic or high style, and so he chooses to become totally
what he is only in part: the poet of "waifs and wraiths of image / And
half-blind questions." He writes an "Hommage to Cliches," and a
famous poem "Wolves"
in
which daily talk and laughter drown out
"howling" prophets like Yeats:
The tide comes
~n
and goes out agam,
1
do not want
To be always stressing either its flux
Qr
its permanence,
1 do not want to
be
a tragic or philosophic chorus
But to keep my eye only on the nearer future
And after that let the sea flow over us.
In one area MacNeice was a pioneer: Auden and he sought to
revive the long conversational poem. A journey to Iceland in 1936
strengthened their attraction to oral tradition. Could they find modern
forms similar to those of ancient formulaic verse? Was there not some–
thing built into speech itself, Kantian forms which made communica–
tion possible and might provide the modern formulary? Auden wrote
his "Letter to Lord Byron," adapting the stanza of that master of gossip,
and MacNeice followed with
Autumn Journal
(1938) and the radio
poem
Autumn Sequel
(1953 ) . Both poems canvass the return of a
vigorous yet contemporary oral tradition. They directly oppose Pound's
Cantos
by rejecting the complex and subduing the striking image. I still
