Macneice Among His Irish Contemporaries: 1939 and 1945

Abstract

The work of Louis MacNeice occupies a central place in accounts of twentieth-century Irish poetry, and critics including Terence Brown, Edna Longley, and Peter McDonald have tried to locate MacNeice among Irish concerns. In his study, Louis MacNeice and the Poetry of the 1930s (2009), Richard Danson Brown sought to recover ‘the English MacNeice’ by considering MacNeice's poems of the 1930s among those of his English contemporaries W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and C. Day Lewis. He implicitly shows that MacNeice's identity is less important than what his poems do. While MacNeice's Irish identity has often been discussed, it is not clear how his poems actually relate to the work of his Irish contemporaries. Derek Mahon proclaimed that MacNeice ‘had no place in the intellectual history of modern Ireland’, while Terence Brown has drawn attention to MacNeice's (mostly frustrated) attempts to become involved in Ireland's ‘intellectual history’.