I find myself something akin to bewildered at the considerable eclipse MacNeice' poetry has experienced since his death. I remember I tried three times to buy his Collected - which pops in and out of print like a comet. When I finally succeeded, it was easily worth the wait.
He is such a technical master, the c rime here catches me offguard every time; I suspect MacNeice might have kept the game up for many more verses, if he had wanted.
I suspect it wouldn't have been a popular poem at the time. Terence Rattigan's After the Dance has the same general message ('We never wanted another war, but we didn't do much to avoid one) - that very nearly destroyed Rattigan's reputation.
C Day Lewis 'Will it be so again' has much the same message - that nobody did anything much to avoid WWII. But Day Lewis plastered his poem with empty rhetoric, and was so much more acceptable.
It's interesting that the submitter connects this poem effortlessly with another daft war - Vietnam. Even with the benefit of hindsight Vietnam looks not entirely necessary. WWII might have been inevitable, but if France, Russia, and England had taken the possibility of another war more seriously WWII might have been much less of an apocalypse. (I heard Neville Chamberlain hissed in a Prague cinema as recently as 1996).
I suppose the weakness, and the strength, of this MacNeice poem is that it is so very uncomfortable. We don't like the way he is being flip about the rise of Hitler, the siege of Leningrad, and the Shoah - but really people were flip about those things; and in part this is why they happened.
We need reminding.
I think there are probably quite a few important poems whose only justification is that we need reminding.
It is a pretty fair justification for a poem.
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