A Comparison of Several Interpretations of "Snow" by Louis MacNeice
Abstract
‘Snow’ was written in January 1935 and included in the middle section of Poems the third work published by MacNeice in September 1935. In the collection, “Snow” had quite an unconspicuous place; it was merely one of the shorter early poems. But in the Collected Poems (1925-1948) published in 1949, it was given a choice position as last poem in the second section. Its importance may have revealed itself to the poet with hindsight. Besides, the poem had become one of the best known works by MacNeice and it had started a critical epic that was to last to this day. We propose here to focus on a series of interpretations spanning thirty five years or so between 1953 and 1988 in order to draw up a comparison. We chose to select the most representative ones but we did not have to carry out long researches to discover the first controversy about the interpretation of the poem.
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