The Ethics of Going North: Moral Geography in Louis MacNeice and Wystan Hugh Auden’s Letters from Iceland

Abstract

Louis MacNeice and Wystan Hugh Auden travelled to Iceland in the summer of 1936. This paper features an analysis of their Letters from Iceland (1937), one of the most innovative and contentious travel books of the interwar period, in terms of the popularity of travelling and travel writing between the wars. I argue that Louis MacNeice and Wystan Hugh Auden’s portrayal of Iceland, its culture, and landscape can be read as a product of the poets’ conscious “tactic of resistance” to the prevalent fascination of the 1930s public and intelligentsia with the “open-air” ethos and travelling south. Besides identifying mutual analogies in the authors’ poetic treatment of Iceland, I also place Auden and MacNeice’s sense of the island within the broader context of their “moral geography,” views on insularity, and approach to escapism.