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 unrecognized 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...