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LOUIS MACNEICE’S
WAR
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When Louis MacNeice disembarked from the linerSamariain Liverpool at the
end of 1940, he came to England as, in his own term, ‘an ex-expatriate’.^1 For
ten months, the poet had been resident in the USA; and before then, at the very
beginning of the War, he had been based briefly in Ireland. The England to which
MacNeice decided to return was now one more fully immersed in the realities of
war than it had been in late 1939: in the poet’s absence, the catastrophic reversal at
Dunkirk had taken place, and the bombing of British cities had begun in earnest;
the Home Front had become something more than a metaphor. As things were to
turn out, MacNeice would spend the War largely in London, working for the BBC
as a features author and producer, with much of his professional effort given over to
the broadcasting of (very broadly conceived) ‘propaganda’. He would also publish
two full-length volumes of poetry during this time—Plant and Phantom(1940)
andSpringboard(1944)—containing the poems that preceded, accompanied, and
followed his decision to spend the War in England, rather than in Ireland or the
United States. While the experience of wartime remained a significant element in all
of MacNeice’s subsequent poetry, most effectively perhaps in his last collectionThe
Burning Perch(1963), his poems written during the War itself make up a distinctive
body of work, recording and giving original shape to the pressures and complexities
of living in and through intense global conflict.
(^1) Louis MacNeice, ‘Traveller’s Return’,Horizon, 3/14 (Feb. 1941); repr. inSelectedProseofLouis
MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 83.