Abstract
But, in the words of the title of Robert Graves’s book, it was also ‘goodbye to all that’. Thomas and Owen were killed in the war in which Graves also fought. The other three survived for one, two and four decades each, but Housman and Hardy were well into the centre of their poetry careers by the time the war started, while Robert Frost returned to a New England 3000 miles away. The Georgian poets dispersed, and the inward brooding voice of the English poet in a moving but rainy, snowy or grey landscape is not found again, bar sporadically, until the second half of the century, today in the new context of our environmental and ecological concerns. MacNeice once wrote an approving review of Frost, but the English thirties poets had their own problems.
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Notes and References
Edna Longley, ‘MacNeice and After’ in Poetry Review, Vol. 78, No. 2 Summer 1988, p. 6.
MacNeice, Selected Literary Criticism, op. cit., pp. 32-3, 43.
Edna Longley, Louis MacNeice (Faber & Faber, 1988), p. 66; Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation (Bodley Head, 1976), p. 369.
MacNeice, op. cit., and The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography (Faber & Faber, 1965).
R. George Thomas (op. cit., p. 236) gives November, but silent action no doubt preceded. That month Edward Thomas also began thinking of enlisting, and may well have been to Wales that summer.
Dylan Thomas, ‘Notes on the Art of Poetry’ in Modern Poets On Modern Poetry, ed. James Scully (Collins/Fontana, 1966), pp. 195-202.
Blake Morrison, The Movement (Methuen, 1980), pp. 147, 149.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course In General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (Fontana/Collins, 1974), esp. ch. I, sections i–iii; Lacan op. cit., p. 154, quoted and discussed in Easthope, Poetry As Discourse, op. cit., ch. 3.
Walford Davies, Dylan Thomas (Open University Press, 1986), p. 115.
Scully, op. cit., p. 197.
Gwen Watkins, Portrait Of A Friend (Gomer Press, 1983), p. 4.
John Bayley, The Romantic Survival (Chatto & Windus, 1957), p. 198.
Scully, op. cit., p. 199.
Walford Davies, op. cit., p. 122.
Paul Ferris, Dylan Thomas (Penguin Books, 1985), ch. 2, esp. pp. 25, 27.
Walford Davies, op. cit., pp. 94-101.
MacNeice, ‘Autumn Sequel’ in Collected Poems, pp. 327-439, esp. canto XX.
Al Alvarez, The New Poetry (Penguin Books, 1962), p. 19; Davie op. cit., p. 64.
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© 1991 John Powell Ward
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Ward, J.P. (1991). Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas. In: The English Line. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21481-5_10
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