“Your Thoughts Make Shape Like Snow”: Louis MacNeice on Stephen Spender

Brown focuses on Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender during the early 1930s to explore how MacNeice's reading of Spender's "Poems" influenced his own breakthrough volume "Poems," and how the observation of this relationship can help to refine understanding of MacNeice's poetics at this turning point in his career. Collegial rivalry allowed MacNeice to see in Spencer's work an example both of what could be done poetically and what should not be trusted politically. In turn, MacNeice's reflection on Spencer's more politically engaged work enabled him to articulate both his resistance to such optimism and his foreboding for the future.