'This Endless Land': Louis Macneice and the Usa (Critical Essay‪)‬

The poem 'Bar-Room Matins', composed by Louis MacNeice in an apartment on Fifth Avenue, New York in 1940, opens with the jaunty line: 'Popcorn peanuts clams and gum'. There is a transatlantic momentum at work here and this points up the necessity of reclaiming MacNeice as a poet of far more range and scope than many critics have fully allowed, by exploring the presence of America in his poetry and foregrounding the centrality of his American experience to the trajectory of his career. MacNeice has too often been considered merely in terms of his relations to either Ireland or England, but his autobiographical narrative The Strings are False begins with his symbolic crossing from the US to Europe in late 1940, 'on a boat going back to a war', thus making for a larger and more complex reality of experience. Indeed, his poem 'Variation on Heraclitus' voices the variable and multi-faceted identity of the poet who will not be fixed or contained: 'Nor need you be troubled to pin me down in my room/ Since the room and I will escape'. (1) As Justin Quinn has astutely observed, MacNeice was 'a Northern Irish poet who refused to accept the borders of his province as the borders of his world'. (2) MacNeice's time in the United States is a defining transitional moment, bridging his so-called 'thirties' phase and his career in BBC radio which lasted until his death. It takes place too, of course, at the onset of World War II, a time of universal upheaval and uncertainty. In many ways, America, as an elsewhere, as a legendary site of limitless imaginative possibilities for the self in the process of becoming, may be seen to have greatly expanded and enriched the work of one of the twentieth century's most important and influential poets. America had long existed as a very real place of adventure and of alternative possibilities in MacNeice's imagination. Aged just four years old, MacNeice wrote a letter to his sister laying out his detailed plan to run away to North America: