MacNeice's interest in allegory and dream is most developed in his series of Clark lectures which comprise Varieties of Parable. This work is a broad survey of allegorical writing in English. A sensitive book, perhaps its most interesting aspect is its treatment of modern allegory, since this throws light on some of the poet's own experiments in the form…. MacNeice sees allegory as the exploration of an image, the creation of a 'special world' with a relationship of meaning to the real. Traditionally this relationship was fairly simple—image embodied concepts familiar to most readers, while the image was comprehensible to them since it received its significance from cultural authority, as, for instance, Bunyan's imaginative world in Pilgrim's Progress depends for its meaning upon the received cultural and doctrinal traditions of Puritan religion. With cultural pluralism the situation, as MacNeice sees it, becomes much more complex. Allegory and...