Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) was a contradictory figure. He was an

Irishman educated in England, where he spent most of his adult life; a

rector's son who became a skeptic; a poet, a travel writer, a dramatist

for the BBC, a critic and a memorialist. He lectured in Classics and had

a penchant for modernism; he was friends with W. H. Auden, Stephen

Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis, yet remained unorthodox within the

'Auden group'; a 'Thirties poet,' he leaned left but never joined the

Communist Party; he fed on W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, the better to

come into his own. The Burning Perch , MacNeice's last and posthumous

collection, combines the poet's various influences and concerns into a

remarkably consistent, however paradoxical, personal project: a quest

for poetic renewal and a perennial past. Embers or ashes, nightmare

visions or ironic pictures, dramatic parables or simple limericks, these

and many other varieties of dissonance come together in a ceaseless

weave of archaized novelty and modernized memories. Through

minute analysis of precise poems, this study shows how MacNeice's

music of disharmony succeeds in finding its own voice, which not to

be false, must achieve a muted singing.