"This powerful new perspective on MacNeices life and work explores his poetry, prose and drama as part of a biographical re-evaluation. Christopher Fauske places the poets relationship with Ireland, the Second World War, his father and the key women in his life at its centre, unravelling unprecedented considerations that challenge the critical foundations of this luminary of Irish writing."--Publisher's description.

Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time draws on new archival research to suggest ways in which MacNeice's poetry is closely linked to contemporaneous developments in Irish literature and culture.

Written between August and December 1938, this poem is a record of MacNeice's emotional and intellectual experience during those months. The trivia of everyday living is set against events in the world outside - the settlement in Munich and slow defeat in Spain.

Long thought to be merely part of the Auden generation, and often viewed as an English poet, Louis MacNeice became important to the postwar generation of Irish poets, especially those from Northern Ireland like Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon, because of his lyrically nuanced considerations of international as well as national issues. Born and raised in Northern Ireland, and educated in England where he resided for much of his adult life, MacNeice answered a need in these poets for a perspective that made the local have larger political significance. He also offered an angry critique of Ireland and Irish history that was tempered by familial love and affection. Michael Longley's selection of poems highlights why the critique and the perspective that MacNeice provided were important to his generation as well as to those that have followed. It also shows us that Louis MacNeice's mixed allegiance between Ireland and England, his urbanity, his postmodern pluralism, and his belief that the personal is political, make him a poet for our day.

Forty chapters, written by leading scholars across the world, describe the latest thinking on modern Irish poetry. The Handbook begins with a consideration of Yeats's early work, and the legacy of the 19th century. The broadly chronological areas which follow, covering the period from the 1910s through to the 21st century, allow scope for coverage of key poetic voices in Ireland in their historical and political context. From the experimentalism of Beckett, MacGreevy, and others of the modernist generation, to the refashioning of Yeats's Ireland on the part of poets such as MacNeice, Kavanagh, and Clarke mid-century, through to the controversially titled post-1969 'Northern Renaissance' of poetry, this volume will provide extensive coverage of the key movements of the modern period. The Handbook covers the work of, among others, Paul Durcan, Thomas Kinsella, Brendan Kennelly, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, and Ciaran Carson. The thematic sections interspersed throughout - chapters on women's poetry, religion, translation, painting, music, stylistics - allow for comparative studies of poets north and south across the century. Central to the guiding spirit of this project is the Handbook's consideration of poetic forms, and a number of essays explore the generic diversity of poetry in Ireland, its various manipulations, reinventions and sometimes repudiations of traditional forms. The last essays in the book examine the work of a 'new' generation of poets from Ireland, concentrating on work published in the last two decades by Justin Quinn, Leontia Flynn, Sinead Morrissey, David Wheatley, Vona Groarke, and others.

Louis MacNeice is increasingly recognised as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and his work has been a defining influence upon a generation of Irish poets that includes Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon. The Selected Letters is indispensable as a resource for an understanding of the intellectual culture of the mid-twentieth century. A Classics don, poet, playwright and globetrotting BBC producer, the medley and blend of MacNeice's cultural influences seems exemplary in its modernity. He kept up a significant correspondence with E. R. Dodds, Anthony Blunt and T. S. Eliot, to name but three prominent figures of the time. During his time at the BBC MacNeice witnessed many key events, including the partition of India in 1947 and the independence of the Gold Coast from Britain in 1957, and these are recorded in two long sequences to his wife, the singer Hedli Anderson. His complex relationship to Ireland and to his Irish heritages speak resonantly to contemporary debates about Irish and Northern Irish cultural identity. Finally, the Letters will do much to broaden our understanding of a vivid and often enigmatic personality whose varied life and individual charisma have often resisted explanation.

In the last fifty years Irish poets have produced some of the most exciting poetry in contemporary literature, writing about love and sexuality, violence and history, country and city. This book, first published in 2003, provides an introduction to major figures such as Seamus Heaney, and also introduces the reader to significant precursors like Louis MacNeice or Patrick Kavanagh, and vital contemporaries and successors: among others, Thomas Kinsella, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Paul Muldoon. Readers will find discussions of Irish poetry from the traditional to the modernist, written in Irish as well as English, from both North and South. This Companion provides cultural and historical background to contemporary Irish poetry in the contexts of modern Ireland but also in the broad currents of modern world literature. It includes a chronology and guide to further reading and will prove invaluable to students and teachers alike.