Louis MacNeice, Ireland and India

Abstract

Despite his Irish birth, it may seem unusual, even eccentric, to include Louis MacNeice in a book with the word ‘postcolonial’ in its title. He has not, to my knowledge, been discussed in such a context. One reason for this is probably the Anglicized upbringing and public school education that, in Derek Mahon’s words, ‘has a way of ironing out differences and turning its products into Englishmen’.¹ As a consequence of this, perhaps, he was for many years seen in one of two ways. For some, his association with the so-called Auden generation of British poets held sway: he was often thought of as secondary to Auden, and sometimes disparaged as lacking substance in comparison. Others saw MacNeice as someone stranded between England and Ireland. ‘For the English reader’, writes Tom Paulin, ‘he appears to be Irish, while for certain Irish readers he doesn’t really belong to Ireland’.² Francis Scarfe, for instance, sees MacNeice as ‘damnably Irish’, while, on the Irish side, examples often adduced are the relative neglect of MacNeice in anthologies such John Montague’s Faber Book of Irish Verse (1974) and Thomas Kinsella’s New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1986).³