Volume 42, Number 18 · November 16, 1995
Feet on the Ground
By John Bayley
Louis MacNeice
by Jon Stallworthy
Norton, 572 pp., $35.00
Yeat's admonition in his Last Poems, published in 1939, could hardly have been of any great encouragement to his fellow countrymen. He towered over Irish poetry, and his famous ability to change his style and 'remake himself' in tune with the century, as well as his still unshaken beliefs in fairies, the mystical, and the occult, made it difficult for younger Irish poets to be as rational in those challenging times as they might have wished to be. With the revival which has culminated in the award of the Nobel Prize to Seamus Heaney, Irish poetry has become far more down-to-earth.
Review, 3098 words
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