'Will Your Birds Be Always Wingless Birds'

A questionnaire sent to Louis MacNeice in 1934 – that “low dishonest decade” was big on sending questionnaires to writers – asked, “Do you take your stand with any political or politico-economic party or creed?” The Irishman replied: “No. In weaker moments I wish I could.” Never a nihilist and never a true believer in anything, unlike many of his fellows, MacNeice remained immune to politics and other systematic modes of thought, whether aesthetic, religious or philosophical. He distrusted dogma. Don’t confuse this with indifference. 

I’ve been reading MacNeice seriously for several months. Despite his well-known associations with Auden and other poets, he impresses me as one of nature’s “isolatoes,” to adopt Ishmael’s word. There’s nothing pathological about his solitariness as a poet and man. He was social and certainly enjoyed female company. But he seems not to have needed the conventional shoring of belief. “My sympathies are Left,” he wrote elsewhere in the Thirties,” but not in my heart or my guts.” When writers define themselves by their politics, they risk peddling themselves like prostitutes.

 

In the nineteen-fifties, MacNeice wrote “To Posterity” (Visitations, 1957), a poem strangely prescient of our diminished world:

 

“When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards

And reading and even speaking have been replaced

By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you

Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste

They held for us for whom they were framed in words,

And will your grass be green, your sky be blue,

Or will your birds be always wingless birds?” 

 

When the world is no longer “framed in words,” when the best eyes and ears of the past are no longer consulted, when we presume to confront the world in all our arrogant solitude, what remains?  A weirdly mutated world of “wingless birds.” Without words, grass is no longer “green” but something less. We have betrayed not only the visual world but our precious cultural inheritance.

 

Even writers, people we persist in believing ought to be independent thinkers, defying the herd, happily join the herd. Another poet, Louise Bogan, answered yet another questionnaire, this one prepared by the editors of Partisan Review in 1939 and collected in A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2005). More than eighty years ago she writes near the end of the same decade as MacNeice, one not unlike our own. Its dogmas too are metastasizing:

 

“The true artist will instinctively reject ‘burning questions’ and all ‘crude oppositions’ which can cloud his vision or block his ability to deal with the world. All this has been fought through before now: Turgenev showed up the pretensions of the political critic Belinsky; Flaubert fought the battle against ‘usefulness’ all his life; Yeats wrote the most superb anti-political poetry ever written. Flaubert wrote, in the midst of one bad political period: ‘Let us [as writers] remain the river and turn the mill.’”