Books: Putting Time on Ice

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MacNeice is dead now, and Auden, an immeasurably more talented poet, has become a happier, wiser traveler, with a preference for balmier summer spots—the island of Ischia near Naples, for instance, and the civilized hills of Austria. But in Letters from Iceland, the two precocious patriarchs of an Oxford poetic school spoke with the same youthful, irreverent voice. The book is probably the only successful verse partnership since the old English firm of Beaumont & Fletcher closed shop. It is, moreover, an object lesson for all dull dogs who could find nothing more exciting in a place like Iceland than watching the glaciers whiz by.