Louis MacNeice and the Poetry of the 1930s

Louis MacNeice is a key twentieth-century poet. His work bears witness to the wide range of his sympathies and his sensitivity to the complicated times in which he lived. His life exemplifies transitions and tensions between conflicting and overlapping commitments, be they aesthetic, national or institutional.This study explores MacNeice’s life and work in the light of these contexts and his relationships with his contemporaries, particularly Auden, Spender and Day Lewis. Though sometimes seen just as a member of the ‘Auden gang’, this study argues that MacNeice developed an independent poetic practice with its own distinctive intellectual and aesthetic agenda. MacNeice is the pre-eminent poet of everydayness, yet the world which emerges from his poetry is seldom stable or safe. Louis MacNeice and Poetry of the 1930s emphasizes MacNeice’s political and moral non conformism, the experimental character of his work throughout his long and varied career, and his partial dislocation as an Irish writer from metropolitan norms through close, historicized readings of key poems.