SOURCE: Longley, Edna. “MacNeice and After.” Poetry Review 78, no. 2 (summer 1988): 6-10.

In the following essay, Longley addresses how MacNeice's structuring and arrangement of poetry has evolved over the course of his career, noting that MacNeice experimented with classic form and focused on the change and unrest in life.

One day, I dream, there will be books with titles like The MacNeice Generation, Thirties Poets—The MacNeice Group, MacNeice and After. To turn the tables is not to deny Auden's eminence—only his pre-eminence. Auden's role in English cultural history, supported then and now by the Auden groupies, distorts the aesthetic history of the 1930s, and the consequent course of poetry in the British Isles. Valentine Cunningham's recent magnum opus draws more on the relentlessly contemporary Spender than on MacNeice's longer-term vision; British Writers of the Thirties also tends to collapse literary modes into a single text or script...