ABSTRACT

This chapter describes some of the implications of Louis MacNeice's frustrations with the Institute and the Council, and by extension their Greek setting, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. If MacNeice had tired of English classical scholars, he would have found Athenian ones less congenial still. George Seferis noted that MacNeice was hardly the sort of man to appeal to the rumbustious and influential G. K. Katsimbalis. A further more banal reason for reserve was simply MacNeice's tongue-tied state in Greece. Always haunted by the close and divided ground of the North of Ireland, MacNeice hints at the Greek civil war aftermath, something the echoes of Whitman's Drum-Taps and Calamus confirm. MacNeice finds from Seferis an attractively hard-bitten modesty by contrast with the over-schematic pretensions of much of Ten Burnt Offerings. The Seferian vein of agnosticism, in particular, seems to affirm MacNeice's sense of where his own vocation lies.