In December 1942, MacNeice wrote a poem which anticipates the end of ‘our way of life’, when the poets of his generation will be superseded by fascistic ‘tight-lipped technocratic Conquista- dores’ (CP 231-2). ‘Epitaph for Liberal Poets’ registers cynical indifference to this prospect - ‘And some shall say So What and some What Matter,/ Ready under new names to exploit or be exploited’ - alongside a recognition that liberalism was an illusion, that the poets themselves were more court jesters than what an earlier poem had called ‘free lances’ (CP 57): ‘Who were expected - and paid - to be ourselves/ Conditioned to think freely’ ‘Liberal’ emphasizes the illusory quality of the poets’ independence: they were never as radical or revolutionary as they assumed they were. However, the poem finally resists defeatism:

‘Epitaph for Liberal Poets’ stresses the improbability that art will survive long beyond its historical moment. Poets who ‘whine[d]’ during their lifetimes may leave behind ‘certain frozen words’: fame is a form of stasis with no guarantee that the deep-frozen texts ‘may melt’ into comprehensibility. At the height of the war in Europe, MacNeice critically reviews his classical education and his life of relative privilege: ‘The Individual has died before; Catullus/ Went down young’. Catullus provides a point of comparison for the liberal poets themselves: ‘Though our songs/ Were not so warm as his, our fate is no less cold’. MacNeicean fame was to become an increasingly chilly business. ‘Memorandum to Horace’ (1962) revisits Horace's boast that his poetry was a monument more lasting than bronze. The poem asks why Horace troubles ‘to be lapidary,/ Knowing posterity […] neither will be able/ Let alone yours, to cope with language’, anticipating a world of ‘communicants in frozen sperm’ who have outgrown linguistic communication (CP 603).