Auden and Macneice: Anthropocentricity

A Made World: Anthropocentricity in the Works of Auden and MacNeice In his 1941 poem “London Rain,” Louis MacNeice writes “The world is what was given / The world is what we make.” In “London Rain” itself, MacNeice does not emphasize the latter sentiment, ultimately hinting at the difficulty of trying to “make” anything in his concluding description of his “wishes…come[ing] homeward / their gallopings in vain.” Yet for all the suggestions of impotence in “London Rain’s” final stanza, in MacNeice’s work as a whole—as in the work of his friend and contemporary W.H. Auden—the “made” world becomes a central topic. Both men draw heavily in their poetry on images of man and the man-made, emphasizing the extent to which the human permeates the world we know and suggesting both the role that humans play as the “makers of history” and the value of things that they make. Discussing his long poem “Letter to Lord Byron,” W.H Auden comments that Byron is “the right [recipient for the poem], I think, because he was a townee … and disliked Wordsworth and all that kind of approach to nature, and I find that very sympathetic.” This interest in the urban world manifests itself throughout Auden’s poetry. In “Letter to Lord Byron,” for example, Auden describes “tramlines and slag heaps, pieces of machinery.” In “Stop all the clocks,” he lingers over an image of “aeroplanes [that] circle moaning overhead.” In “Dover,” he modernizes his picture of a Norman castle with the descriptor, “flood-lit at night,” and in “There is no Change of Place,” he describes how “metals run, / Burnished or rusty in the sun, / From town to town.” Filled with trains and factories, vacant lots and city streets, Auden’s poetry is grounded not in the more timeless pastoral landscapes of his Romantic and Georgian predecessors but rather in an industrialized world shaped and re-shaped by the works of man. Auden did not write exclusively about urban landscapes, of course. Especially in his early