Louis MacNeice | ScienceGate

Studying Woolf’s relationship with the British male poets who first came to public attention in the 1930s clarifies tensions of the time concerning gender, generations, and, especially, literary form. The poetry of W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, John Lehmann, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender provoked Woolf’s criticism in large part for a reason that has received little attention, Woolf’s competition with poetry. This spirit of competition was not matched by the 1930s poets themselves. While Woolf’s criticism prompted the poets’ counter-arguments, Woolf’s fiction stirred only the young poets’ admiration, and in some cases imagination, both in her lifetime and after. This chapter looks at Woolf’s “A Letter to a Young Poet,” the poets’ response to Woolf in letters, poetry, and criticism, Woolf’s essay “The Leaning Tower” (1941), and the poets’ writing on Woolf after her death.

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“Ireland is Small Enough”: Louis MacNeice and Patrick Kavanagh

A Companion to Irish Literature ◽

10.1002/9781444328066.ch39 ◽

2012 ◽

pp. 159-175

Author(s):

Alan Gillis

Keyword(s):

Louis Macneice

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‘The lonely flight of Mind’

Rediscovering E. R. Dodds ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198777366.003.0011 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 210-227

Author(s):

Tom Walker

Keyword(s):

Academic Work ◽

Modern Poetry ◽

Louis Macneice ◽

Professional Classicist

This chapter discusses E.R. Dodds’s relationship with modern poetry. While he is very much known as a professional classicist rather than poet, Dodds might still be enlighteningly thought of as a poetical scholar. This is not only in the sense that his scholarship relates to his attempts to write poetry or that he followed in the footsteps of his academic mentor Gilbert Murray. Rather, his academic work was partly informed by the modes of thinking and feeling that were embodied in the work of the modern poets he admired, while his words and ideas also had some impact on certain contemporary poets. The chapter then traces the intertwined relationship between Dodds’s developing scholarly interests—particularly in relation to questions of metaphysics and mysticism—and his engagement with modern poetry in the case of two of the poets he considers to have been the best of his lifetime: W.B. Yeats and Louis MacNeice.

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The work of Man: Louis MacNeice and W. H. Auden

The Problem of Consciousness in Modern Poetry ◽

10.1017/cbo9780511519253.008 ◽

1992 ◽

pp. 215-268

Keyword(s):

Louis Macneice

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MacNeice, Louis (1907–1963)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem1518-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Ian Whittington

Keyword(s):

Adult Life ◽

Sense Perception ◽

British Broadcasting Corporation ◽

Louis Macneice ◽

Literary Fame

Poet, critic, and broadcaster Louis MacNeice was an influential member of the generation of British poets who came to artistic maturity in the 1930s. Born the son of a Protestant minister (later a bishop) in Belfast, and raised in nearby Carrickfergus, MacNeice would live most of his adult life in England, where he balanced the literary fame he enjoyed from the 1930s onwards with a career at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) that lasted from 1941 until his death in 1963. Though professionally and personally connected to other major poets of the 1930s, MacNeice wrote verse that tended to eschew the fervent commitments of that decade in favor of an attention to sense perception and a wry, sophisticated skepticism directed equally at political, national, and religious affiliations.

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