'By Other, Less Difficult, Media'

Prophecy is best left to the prophets. Writers are not a notably prescient bunch. Too often, like the rest of us, they see only what they hope for, not what the future holds. Consider the catastrophe-mongering of the late Paul Ehrlich. And yet, while hardly trying, a writer will sometimes stumble onto a keyhole into the future. Seventy years ago, Louis MacNeice wrote “To Posterity” (Visitations, 1957):

 “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?”

 

It reads like an elegy for poetry and literary culture. “Books in graveyards” recalls Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” with its “storied urn.” Traditionally, a book carved into a gravestone signified the Book of Life, awaiting review by the Heavenly Critic. Engines and epileptics “seize up,” frozen into inoperability. Ours is inarguably the age of “other, less difficult, media.” Critics have been calling our time “post-literate” at least since the Sixties. It’s a happy new reality for some (those who prefer their media “less difficult”), grievous for others (all who live by the word).

 

MacNeice pays poetry and the written word a splendid compliment. 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.

 

In his 1935 essay “Poetry To-day” (Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice, 1987), MacNeice had already addressed posterity, saying it “affects to put dead poets and movements in their place; to tell us their real significance and cancel out their irrelevances.” Such presumption is, he says, “tidy and saves thinking.” MacNeice rises to eloquent common sense:

 

“If we do our duty by the present moment, posterity can look after itself. To try to anticipate the future is to make the present past; whereas it should already be on our conscience that we have made the past past. We fail to appreciate a great poet like Horace because we don’t let him puzzle us.”

 

MacNeice failed to foresee his own death at age fifty-five a mere six years after “To Posterity.”