Louis MacNeice's representations of Anglo-Irish identity

Abstract

Louis MacNeice’s early reception was grounded in the context of the left-wing English poets of the 1930s such as Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden and C. Day Lewis.  With the emergence of the poets of the Northern Renaissance in the late 1960s (such as Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley), MacNeice’s reputation found a new context which registered his upbringing until the age of ten in Belfast and Carrickfergus and focused to a greater extent on his writing on Northern and Southern Ireland.  Much of the criticism on MacNeice which emerged in Northern Ireland concentrated on deconstructing his image as a member of the ‘Auden gang’ who had an idiosyncratic interest in Classicism and in empirical observation.  There is, however, a discernible dearth of critical comment on how MacNeice’s reputation was orchestrated in the context of Northern Ireland and on how it has developed in the last three decades.

In the light of the two critical contexts within which MacNeice’s reputation has found a place, this thesis examines him as a transitional figure.  It considers his position between the Thirties canon and his posthumous framing as an antecedent to a later generation of Northern Irish writers.  While the poet’s perceived misrepresentations in the 1930s canon have been discussed at great length, the orchestration of MacNeice’s characterisation in the canon of Northern Irish poetry has received little critical comment.  This Thesis endeavours to redress that balance.  In order to assess the emerging portrayal of MacNeice’s reputation since the late 1960s until the contemporary period, the study pays especially close attention to the developing representations his work has received in poetry anthologies which were edited by many of the architects of the ‘Northern Renaissance’.

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