The Room Where MacNeice Wrote "Snow" and the Invention of Northern Irish Poetry

Abstract

The Room Where MacNeice Wrote "Snow" and the Invention of Northern Irish Poetry Anna Teekell (bio) When its parliament opted out of the Free State on 7 December 1922, Northern Ireland was born through exemption rather than addition: a community unimagined before, a troubled amalgamation of British Ulster and Irish Ireland. This year the shaky coalition government at Stormont faced the daunting challenge of marking the centenary of the Government of Ireland Act that created Northern Ireland without igniting the specter of violence that haunts the post-Brexit border. In the face of the celebratory sectarian logos and campaigns created by the Orange Order and the Democratic Unionist Party, the coalition government and its official agencies leaned on the strength of the arts communities when they developed the "Our Story in the Making: NI Beyond 100" campaign.1 Since its 1995 creation the Arts Council of Northern Ireland has sought to create a shared culture for the region's two communities, claiming that "art has the ability to reach across boundaries, inspiring, teaching, and bringing people together."2 In addition to distributing government funding to individuals and organizations, the Arts Council advocates for arts in various arenas both on the ground and online, including the curation of the Troubles Archive—a digital resource showcasing art, literature, and music made during [End Page 241] and about the Troubles.3 Speaking about the early years of the organization, Edna Longley recalled the motivating conviction "that culture can bandage violence, which it can't do, but nonetheless, it can contribute to a movement of cultural self-consciousness, of mutual consciousness between people from different traditions."4 Such a "mutual consciousness" has, in the decades since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, evolved from a two-nations approach to the literature of Northern Ireland to the easy application of "Northern Irish" to writing that previously would have been labeled either Irish or British. As a component of the peace process, this rebranding represents a major cultural victory, and since Anna Burns's 2018 Man Booker Prize win for Milkman, Northern Irish literature has been having a vogue moment. The ease with which we now speak about this regional literature as a cultural phenomenon suggests that the Arts Council of Northern Ireland's branding emerges from dual traditions: the United Kingdom's use of the British Council to mobilize arts and culture as a political tool, as well as the Republic of Ireland's framing of literary culture as both revolutionary impetus and tourism product. Northern Irish literature, crowned already with the laurel of Seamus Heaney's 1995 Nobel Prize ("for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth"), has become an easy sell.5 While politics during Northern Ireland's centenary can be more difficult to predict than the weather, one might venture a literary forecast: we will continue to see a lot of "Snow." Louis MacNeice and the "National Lyric" "Snow," the twelve-line poem published by Louis MacNeice in 1935, "has acquired the status of national lyric for a younger generation of writers" in Northern Ireland, according to Glenn Patterson.6 The [End Page 242] novelist and director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's University Belfast titled a 1995 television episode of the BBC series 29 Bedford Street "More of It Than We Think" after a line from the same poem.7 The editors of The Tangerine, a Belfast-based literary magazine founded in 2016 to "provide a space for a plurality of voices,"8 cite the central stanza of MacNeice's poem to explain their publication's title: World is crazier and more of it than we think,Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portionA tangerine and spit the pips and feelThe drunkenness of things being various.9 This turn to "Snow" reflects a commonplace citation of the lyric—and MacNeice's writing more generally—as an example of poetry that can hold in productive tension the conflicting pluralities that characterize Northern Ireland. As a native of Belfast and son of a Connemara-born nationalist Protestant bishop who refused the sign the Ulster Covenant,10 Mac-Neice's personal background fits him well...