“Now I must make amends.”
It is often said (when people are talking of the “Auden group,” those poets who came to prominence with Auden in the Thirties) that MacNeice was the collective’s resident skeptic. Others, you will hear from Samuel Hynes in his book,
The Auden Generation, from Edna Longley in her study of MacNeice, from Robyn Marsack and Beret Strong and Peter MacDonald in chapters on MacNeice, even from Seamus Perry and Mark Ford in their recent
London Review of Books podcast episode on MacNeice flirted with political commitment (Stephen Spender is usually singled out as the most gung-ho enthusiast for movements, but Auden and C. Day Lewis also get credit, or blame, for at least provisionally throwing their weight behind some cause), but MacNeice stayed scrupulously on the sidelines. One way to read the whole of