louis macneice
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2021 ◽  

The literature of the 1930s occupies an important and complex position in critical accounts of modern British and Irish writing. Unlike terms such as modernism and postmodernism, writing of the 1930s does not announce itself as an “ism,” seeming at first glance to operate as a neutral label for writing that happens to have been published in the period 1930–1939. Like modernism and postmodernism, however—indeed in some ways even more so—the term is, in practice, associated with a specific set of thematic concerns, aesthetic approaches, and political commitments. The unique literary mythology of the “Red Decade” was being deliberately and self-consciously encoded by key protagonists before the decade was out, with W. H. Auden influentially regretting the “clever hopes” of a “low, dishonest decade” in his poem “September 1, 1939.” Auden’s own accounts of his dalliance with left-wing, committed writing and his subsequent disillusionment—mirrored by the trajectories of Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and others—helped to consolidate a narrative of the decade’s literature as one that began with the articulation of overweening “clever hopes,” and ended as these were exposed as dangerous, adolescent illusions. The thirties, for some time, operated as a convenient box for the idea of committed literature. The decade confronted students of modern literature like a carefully curated museum display designed to illustrate the folly of mixing political commitment with literature. Yet this familiar narrative of the decade’s writing is modeled around the particular experiences of a few, largely male, upper-middle-class poets. Since the 1980s, the general tendency of scholarship has been to complicate or unpick this narrative, expanding the canon beyond the Auden circle, emphasizing continuities with the modernism of the 1920s, and producing more nuanced accounts of committed literature that are not bound up with its inevitable failure. These shifts have gone along with a rising tide of scholarly interest in previously neglected women writers, including Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Rose Macaulay, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, among many others. In our own troubled political times, literature of the ‘thirties continues to provoke and fascinate because of the important questions it poses about writing and commitment, even while the forms of commitment and the range of writers studied under this heading have proliferated. Through this process an excessively tidy literary-historical narrative has increasingly been replaced by something messier, more open ended, and ultimately more interesting.


2021 ◽  
pp. 243-274
Author(s):  
Emily Kopley

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 104-114
Author(s):  
Catriona Clutterbuck
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-33
Author(s):  
Gabriela Czernecka

Abstract This paper discusses the representation of Dublin in the selected poetry of Louis MacNeice and some of the stories from James Joyce’s collection Dubliners. A close investigation of the city as a representative of urban space is interlinked with an examination of its role from the perspective of psychogeography. Both techniques are applied to show why and how two Irish authors portray the multi-dimensional decay of life in the city. In order to paint a whole picture of the relation between ‘space’ and ‘human’, I will also review the biographies of MacNeice and Joyce. For MacNeice, who was tormented by the experiences of domestic Belfast, going to the South was a promising escape. Yet, the change of urban setting did not bring him the expected result. MacNeice quickly became aware of the dirty, paralysed face of Dublin. Similarly, the childhood and day-to-day reality of the lower-middle-class profoundly shaped Joyce’s perspective of Dublin and, eventually, prompted him to go into deliberate exile in Europe. In his writings, however, Dublin constitutes the focal point of the structure, becoming an active participant in the events. Therefore, Dublin for MacNeice and Joyce is a place characterized by blandness, powerlessness in the face of foreign influences, and suffering caused by inertia.


Author(s):  
Amanda Blake Davis

Abstract Ambivalence is the hallmark of Shelley’s poetry, but the ambivalence of Shelley’s often underappreciated wit remains a relatively uncharted area of critical exploration. The characterization of laughter as ‘heartless fiend’ – or ‘heartless friend’ – in Shelley’s sonnet ‘To Laughter’ underscores this very ambivalence while also spotlighting the sociality of laughter. Drawing upon the ancient Greek ambiguities of laughter as socially divisive and socially integrative, laughter in Shelley’s poetry vacillates between ostracizing bursts and harmonizing glee. This essay explores the ambivalence of Shelleyan laughter and its echo in the poetry of Louis MacNeice, prompted by the modern poet’s early interest in ‘a comparison of Shelley & Nietzsche & a deification of laughter’. MacNeice’s realist leanings remain coloured by Romantic predispositions throughout his career. With attention to Shelley and MacNeice’s Classical backgrounds, this essay reveals how Shelleyan laughter echoes throughout MacNeice’s poetry and, in its ambivalence, unveils the extent to which identity is unfixed for both poets.


2019 ◽  
pp. 210-227
Author(s):  
Tom Walker

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.


Author(s):  
Allan Hepburn

More often than not, the blitz was represented by bombed churches. Images of St Paul’s Cathedral soaring above smoke and, in a more tragic key, the ruins of St Michael’s Cathedral in Coventry encapsulate the values that Britons thought they were fighting for in the Second World War. John Piper, Cecil Beaton, Hanslip Fletcher, and other visual artists, many of them employed by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC), expressed their ideas about British heritage through paintings, drawings, and photographs of church architecture. At the same time, writers such as Virginia Woolf, John Strachey, John Betjeman, and Louis MacNeice modulated their patriotism—with quibbles and caveats—into ‘a faith to fight for’. Drawing on poetry, novels, tracts, newspaper articles, and visual culture, this chapter demonstrates the propagandistic value of bombed churches during the Second World War, then flashes forward to the consecration of the rebuilt cathedral in Coventry, which opened with great fanfare and an arts festival in May 1962.


Author(s):  
Allan Hepburn

During and after the Second World War, religion informed British literature and culture. Leading writers contributed to discussions about faith and spiritual life, inside and outside organized religion. Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and Barbara Pym incorporated miracles, evil, and church-going into their novels, while Louis MacNeice, T. S. Eliot, and C. S. Lewis gave radio broadcasts about the role of Christianity in contemporary society. Certainly the war revived interest in aspects of Christian life: salvation and redemption were on many people’s minds. The Ministry of Information used images of bombed churches to stoke patriotic feeling, and King George VI led a series of Days of National Prayer that coincided with crucial events in the Allied cause. After the war and throughout the 1950s, approximately 1.4 million people converted to Roman Catholicism as a way of expressing their spiritual ambitions and solidarity with humanity on a world-wide scale. Eminent intellectuals, such as Paul Tillich, Ronal Niebuhr, Jacques Maritain, and Simone Weil, gave concerted thought to religion and statehood, often at the same time. The mid-century turn to religion offered ways to articulate statehood, not from the usual perspective of nationhood and politics, but from the perspective of moral action and improvement of the lot of humankind. Religion provided one way for writers to answer the question, ‘what is man?’ It also afforded ways to think about social obligation. Instead of being a retreat into seclusion and solitude, the mid-century turn to religion is a call to responsibility.


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