Louis MacNeice: The Poet in His Contexts

ISBN-13: 9780198117667 / Angielski / Twarda / 1991 / 256 str.

Peter McDonald

Opis

Since his death in 1963, Louis MacNeice's critical standing has risen steadily. This new study addresses the contexts of his writing that are of greatest relevance to his place in modern poetry: his problematic relation to Ireland and his place in the largely English "thirties generation" with which he is often identified. The influence of these aspects on MacNeice's poetic development is studied in detail, addressing his relation to Yeats and Modernism and his conception of parable as a key imaginative response to these influences. Included also is the first study of the poet's revealing and little-known early writings. Arguing that MacNeice is a central figure in modern Irish and British poetry, this work sheds new light on the poems.

Recenzje

'Through careful, impressively detailed reconstructions of the literary and political climates of the early and late 1930s, the war years, and the post-war period in Britain, he convincingly rescues MacNeice from the conventional critical estimates of his work ... When ... as in his study of the remarkable late poems, McDonald gets down to sustained analyses of those poems he unreservedly admires in their own complex right, as it were, he establishes himself as one of MacNeice's most astute critics.' Terence Brown, University of Dublin, Review of English Studies, Vol. 44, No. 176, Nov '93