Louis MacNeice and the Irish poetry of his time. / Tom Walker.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Walker, Tom, 1981-

Series:

Oxford English monographs

Oxford English Monographs

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

MacNeice, Louis, 1907-1963--Criticism and interpretation.

MacNeice, Louis.

MacNeice, Louis, 1907-1963.

Irish poetry--20th century--History and criticism.

Irish poetry.

Criticism and interpretation.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

vi, 240 pages ; 22 cm.

Place of Publication:

Corby : Oxford University Press, 2015.

Summary:

This study focuses on Louis MacNeice's creative and critical engagement with other Irish poets during his lifetime. It draws on extensive archival research to uncover the previously unrecognised extent of the poet's contact with Irish literary mores and networks. Poetic dialogues with contemporaries including F.R. Higgins, John Hewitt, W.R. Rodgers, Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague, and Richard Murphy are traced against the persistent rhetoric of cultural and geographical attachment at large in Irish poetry and criticism during the period. These comparative readings are framed by accounts of MacNeice's complex relationship with the oeuvre of W.B. Yeats, which forms a meta-narrative to MacNeice's broader engagement with Irish poetry. Yeats is shown to have been MacNeice's contemporary in the 1930s, reading and reacting to the younger poet's work, just as MacNeice read and reacted to the older poet's work.0But the ongoing challenge of the intellectual and formal complexity of Yeats's poetry also provided a means through which MacNeice, across his whole career, dialectically developed various modes through which to confront modernity's cultural, political and philosophical challenges. This book offers new and revisionary perspectives on MacNeice's work and its relationship to Ireland's literary traditions, as well as making an innovative contribution to the history of Irish literature and anglophone poetry in the twentieth century.

Contents:

1 Yeats's MacNeice 11

2 Racial and Regional Rhythms 47

3 Letters Home 79

4 Irish Characters 107

5 A Little Solemnity 135

6 MacNeice's Byzantium 158.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780198745150

019874515X

OCLC:

903804140