visitations - bbcdownloads.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/northernireland/bbcni...yorkshire and delhi. in...

MacNeice was awarded the CBE in the 1958 New Year’s Honourslist. He recalled his conversation with The Queen:

“Herself asked me ‘What do you do?’ and I said, ‘Well, I do radio.I also write.’ She said: ‘Have you been doing it long?’”

In 1958 MacNeice was sent on a BBC television training course.He adapted two Strindberg plays for the small screen. But healways preferred radio. The following year he undertook a lecturetour of South African colleges and universities.

In March 1961, MacNeice’s new collection Solstices waspublished.

“To assess one’s own development is difficult. I would say of myselfthat I have become progressively more humble in the face of mymaterial and therefore less ready to slap poster paint all over it.”MacNeice on Solstices (1961)

During this period the BBC Features Department was visited by ateam of management consultants. Their conversation with MacNeicehas become the stuff of legend:

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To work. To my own office, my own job,Not matching pictures, but inventing sound,Precalculating microphone and knob

In homage to the human voice.From Autumn Sequel (1954)

MacNeice’s response was to direct his energies towards his radiowork. His output in the following years varied greatly in range andscale: in 1955 alone he produced programmes on the Nile,Yorkshire and Delhi. In 1957 MacNeice received an HonoraryD.Litt from Queen’s University in Belfast, and published a newcollection of poems, Visitations.

“I like to think that my latest short poems are on the whole moreconcentrated and better organized than my earlier ones, relyingmore on syntax and bony feature than on bloom or frill or thefloating image. I should also like to think that sometimes theyachieve a blend of ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’, marrying the elementof wit to the sensuous-mystical element.”MacNeice, on Visitations (1957)

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Acceptsappointment toEstablishedStaff, 1957

Visit of Queen Elizabeth IIto the BBC, 1953

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In the summer of 1961 MacNeice renegotiated his contract withthe BBC, becoming a part-time employee. This was something of arelief both to MacNeice and to the BBC.

“I believe that this new arrangement will stimulate MacNeice tocreative activity in fields outside radio, and that this, in turn, will have a beneficial effect on his radio work when he returns to work for us.”Laurence Gilliam

1962 and 1963 proved a period of extraordinary creativity, withMacNeice completing the poems for his collection The BurningPerch, as well as writing bookreviews, a book on astrology,and delivering the CambridgeClark Lectures.

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Consultants: “We see, Mr MacNeice, that during the past sixmonths you have produced only one programme. Can you tell uswhat you were doing the rest of the time?”MacNeice: “Thinking.”

“Study of a sensitive and sympathetic man getting blunted andpossibly corrupted by finding himself in the wrong job.”MacNeice’s proposal for a new broadcast play, The Administrator, March 1960

By this time, MacNeice was drinkingheavily.

“A good deal of Features Department’stime in those days was spent in either the Stag or, further down the road, theGeorge. This was the way that Louisworked, but God, he did get through a lot of work as well.”Anthony Thwaite, Archive Hour: Louis MacNeice (2007)

“How Louis wrote so much, read so much, travelled so much, drank so much and had so much time for his friends baffled me.Once we were walking past the old Group Theatre when hestopped suddenly and addressed me seriously.‘Are you a drinking man?’‘No, I wouldn’t call myself one, I drink irregularly but seldomseriously.’‘I drink very regularly and very seriously.’”John Boyd, The Middle of My Journey (1990)

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Cover for The Mad Islands & The

Administrator

MacNeice’s Staff Card

Cover for The Burning Perch

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In July 1963 he recorded an unscripted talk on his childhood yearsfor John Boyd. Broadcast on the BBC’s Third Programme, ChildhoodMemories remains the only extant recording of the poet talkingabout his own life.

“. . . the McCanns have just lodged their visiting poetwho by noon will cross from the Elbow Room to the studiosin Ormeau Avenue, and deliver his talk, unscripted,on ‘Childhood Memories’; whose sleep now, if sleep it is,remains unbroken through the small, insensible hoursbetween the whiskey nightcap and a breakfast of whiskey.”Peter McDonald, ‘The Neighbours’

In August 1963 MacNeice visited Yorkshire to gather sound effectsfor his radio play Persons from Porlock.

“I was very glad to hear that this had been accepted but am nowsomewhat distressed to hear that you want a different title . . . itwould break my heart if either the word ‘person’ or the name‘Porlock’ disappeared from the title . . . I could easily add a sub-title– something like ‘A Study in 20th Century Frustration’.”MacNeice memo to Assistant Head of Features, February 1963

The programme involved recordingunderground. MacNeice, anxious that thesounds captured would be absolutelyaccurate, insisted on going down aYorkshire pothole with a BBC engineer. He got wet, caught a chill and developedviral pneumonia. He was admitted to hospitalon 27 August, and died on 3 September.

“MacNeice’s premature death at the age of fifty-five had shockedus. We felt bereaved of a father-figure whom we had only recentlybeen getting to know.”Michael Longley

MacNeice’s funeral was held on Saturday, 7 September 1963, in St John’s Wood Church in London. His ashes are buried inCarrowdore churchyard in County Down.

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MacNeice circa 1963

Headstone of MacNeice’s grave,Carrowdore churchyard

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“As a radio writer, he had almost no rivals. Many distinguishedpoets and dramatists have contributed to the radio form but nonehave used radio as a principal medium of expression so consistentlyand over so long a span of time.”Christopher Holmes writing in the Radio Times (1965)

“Louis MacNeice was a cat who walked by himself. He had aquality of great stillness, as he watched at Lord’s or Twickenham, in a Delhi bazaar or a Dublin pub, but there was always a sense ofrestrained movement and energy conserved for the decisive spring.”Obituary, The Times (4 September, 1963)

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The tributes were laudatory:

“It seems almost grotesque to write about Louis MacNeice in thepast tense. His sudden death (aged fifty-five) from bronchialpneumonia makes no sense or meaning. He always seemeddestined for a long career, one who would survive, a manpossessed of immense staying-power and a mind like a dynamo; of natural distinction and dignity, as Apollonian as his friend DylanThomas was Dionysian.”‘Louis MacNeice: A Tribute’ by Cyril Connolly (1963)

“I am confident that posterity will sustain my conviction, that LouisMacNeice’s later poems show an advance upon his earlier, aremore certain in their technique, brilliant though that always was,and more moving, but even if I thought otherwise, I should stilladmire him for risking failure rather than being content to repeathimself successfully.”From W.H. Auden’s Memorial Address (1963)

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W.H. Auden, 1964 List of personal possessions collected from MacNeice’s BBC office after his death

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The posthumously published poem ‘Thalassa’ is one of MacNeice’s finest:

Put out to sea, ignoble comrades,Whose record shall be noble yet;Butting through scarps of moving marbleThe narwhal dares us to be free;By a high star our course is set,Our end is Life. Put out to sea.First published in the London Magazine (1964)

MacNeice’s legacy is not only to the BBC and to the many poets and writers from Northern Ireland who have been influenced by him: it is above all to the generations of readers and listeners who have been inspired by his work.

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The Features Department, whichhad encouraged and nurtured theart of imaginative writing forradio, was disbanded early in1965, as the BBC further soughtto respond to the challenges andopportunities of television.

The Burning Perch, MacNeice’s final collection of poetry, waspublished shortly after his death.

“From the abounding memory source of ‘Soap Suds’ to the as-it-is-now-and-ever-shall-be mythic take on ‘Charon’, the book had swiftness and inevitability and left an indelible mark.”Seamus Heaney

“He seemed like his later work, grim and sardonic, scored by longexperience, though there was a wistful nobility too. If the world heloved so much had let him down, the long head rose above it – as his best work now rises above that of his contemporaries.”Derek Mahon

“His poetry reconciles traditionalism and Modernism. In a curiousway MacNeice did more than other twentieth-century poets to testpoetry against the century. He tested it against the claims of politicsand philosophy, against the pressures of cities and war. And he did not take the outcome of these tests, or of anything else, for granted.”Edna Longley, Louis MacNeice: A Critical Study (1988)

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Louis MacNeice,1952

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World is crazier and more of it than we think,Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feelThe drunkenness of things being various.

Bernard MacLaverty Born in Belfast, Bernard MacLaverty was educated at Queen’s University Belfast. His first short-story collection Secrets waspublished in 1977. His novels Lamb and Cal were memorablyadapted for film in 1983 and 1984 and Grace Notes (1997) was nominated for the Booker Prize. His television play My DearPalestrina was produced by BBCNI in 1980. A long-time residentof Glasgow, he regularly broadcasts with BBC Radio 3 and BBC Scotland.

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Short Reflections on MacNeiceBernard MacLavertyLouis MacNeice was born in BrookhillAvenue, Belfast, close by theWaterworks. This was a couple ofminutes’ walk from where I lived inAtlantic Avenue. As a teenager I wouldwalk past this house and feel awe thatsomebody so brilliant with words hadlived so close. The first poem of his Icame across was 'Prayer before Birth'. In its lunge at language it reminded meof Gerard Manley Hopkins with its

powerful rhythmic drive and internal rhymes and alliteration.'Bagpipe Music' was a comic version of these strengths.

MacNeice's poems force you to remember them. (I like DonPaterson's definition of a poem as 'a little machine for rememberingitself'.) Later I would come to love the love poems. And AutumnJournal is still as powerful and fresh as the day it was written –predicting and condemning 'men who shoot straight in the cause of crooked thinking'. To end with a book as good as The BurningPerch (1963) means that MacNeice died while still creating his best work. Sadly he could not take Yeats's advice 'to go empty to his grave'. A number of years ago a group of Dublin sixth formersput together an anthology of greatly loved poems chosen by a range of people. They asked me and (although it must be said that your favourite anything changes from day to day) I chose 'The introduction' by Louis MacNeice – a black and bitter piece of brilliance and wit. His greatness lies in his mastery of 'the hooks and eyes of words' and his awareness of the ordinary. From 'Snow',

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Both were on the whiskey, the effect being to make Webb witty andMacNeice morose. We spoke to Webb and I tried in vain to get a response out of MacNeice, preferably some poetry talk. Perhaps,frustrated by his reluctance, I got a bit truculent too. (What a painin the neck I must have been.) They'd been to a rugby internationalat Lansdowne Road, and MacNeice's report appeared the nextweek in the New Statesman, its circulation higher then than now.He mentioned Dublin pubs and remarked on their 'aggressive' (bad mannered) students. We had been put in our place. He died the following year.

Not exactly Keats and Coleridge, is it? But it's seldom a good ideato meet your admired authors; you will often be disappointed. (Not always: Keats wasn't, for one.) Not meaning any harm, theymay take no notice of you; or, meaning a little harm, they may putyou down. Besides, they are generally older, wearier and lessforthcoming than you might wish, and words of wisdom will be few.Such was my experience of MacNeice. I was just some Belfastwhippersnapper of course. He was in rugby mode; though once a nifty scrum-half, I'd lost interest in rugby. He didn't want to bebothered (why should he?) and he was tired of words, of which hehad written a great many. Tired too, perhaps, of life itself: it's therein the last poems. But you knew that, even if you got on the wrongside of him, he wouldn't clobber you like some. His eyes were kind,and it was his eyes that spoke. The mouth might snarl, the gnashersflash, but that was just his manner: the gaze was a speculative andnot unfriendly one. He seemed like his later work, grim andsardonic, scored by long experience, though there was a wistfulnobility too. If the world he loved so much had let him down, thelong head rose above it – as his best work now rises above that ofhis contemporaries.

Derek MahonBorn in Belfast, the poet Derek Mahon was educated at TrinityCollege, Dublin and the Sorbonne. His poetry collections includeNight-Crossing (1968), The Hudson Letter (1995) and The YellowBook (1997). His journalistic posts include those of Features Editorat Vogue and Literary Editor of the New Statesman. A member ofAosdána, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize in 2007 inrecognition of a lifetime’s achievement in literature.

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Derek Mahon

Eclogues between the TruculentI met him twice if you can call itmeeting, and both times he was in rugbymode. Calling one afternoon at the flatin Regent's Park he shared with theactress Mary Wimbush, we found himwatching rugby on TV and saying little.Constrained by his rugby-watchingsilence, I said little myself. What did I

expect, poetry talk? (A big fan, I'd recently read his latest collectionSolstices, which I thought disappointing; this must have been 1962.)We watched some rugby and then it was time to go. I got theimpression that, even without the rugby, he would have beenuncommunicative. The curtains were closed and I saw only a gravegrey head and a sombre equine face; though literally long in thetooth, he had 'presence'. I was virtually ignored but didn't mind,aware that, while to me he was the great poet, to him I wasnobody in particular.

Grand houses in Regent's Park were not my usual ambience. I was much struck by this one, by the elegant Mary Wimbush, and by the voices.

Louis was nasal Oxford, a sonorous growl, Mary pure BBC circa1960; those there of my own age had already adopted 'Mockney'and a shared idiom of branché, cool and ciao.

Some months later I was sitting with other students in a well-knownDublin pub and noticed two older men at a nearby table, onetalkative, one taciturn. The taciturn one was MacNeice. With thebumptiousness of youth we went over and introduced ourselves; he didn't remember me of course. He wore some kind of ananorak, looked unkempt, and acknowledged us with a polite snarland a sidelong flash of the horsy teeth. The talkative one, BillWebb, books editor of the Manchester Guardian, as it then was,chuckled at our intrusion. He was a lively man in tweeds, with ashort pepper-and-salt beard, who had put himself in charge of thetruculent Louis.

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Gerald DaweI think I first came across Louis MacNeicewhen I was at Orangefield Boys' Schoolin Belfast in the Sixties. One of the settexts for the 'A' Level in English Literaturewas the Faber Book of Modern Verse, ananthology edited by Michael Roberts,which included a couple of MacNeicepoems. Immediately I was very taken bythe contemporary sound of his poetry, butalso by the enigmatic, 'hidden' qualitytoo. As if something wasn't being given

away lightly. I bought MacNeice's Selected Poems, edited by W. H.Auden, and have been reading him ever since – the poetry, mainly,but also his criticism and the unfinished autobiography, The Strings areFalse, all of which are sharp-eyed, questioning, and wear theirlearning lightly. I've also taken to a little-noticed book of MacNeice's,an early work, I Crossed the Minch, as well as his wonderful study,Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay, which really should be republished.

MacNeice's 'career' as a lecturer, critic and broadcaster concealshow much he lived under the surface – the poems were his life-raft, his oxygen, his escape route, a way of understanding himself. I oftenthink how tragic it was that he died so young, relatively speaking. The Burning Perch, his last book of poems, is certainly among hisbest, and had he survived the strains and stresses of a fairly batteredphysical and emotional life, he could well, like Yeats, have written outof a great final surge and produced work into the Seventies andEighties. That wasn't to be. But the Collected Poems of LouisMacNeice, edited with such care and attention by Peter McDonald, is a timeless testament to one of the great poets from Ireland. I hopethe rest of the world hears about Louis MacNeice, for he deserves the widest possible audience, now, more than ever.

Gerald DaweBelfast-born poet Gerald Dawe was educated at Orangefield Boys'School, Belfast, the University of Ulster at Coleraine and theNational University of Ireland, Galway. He has published sixcollections of poetry, including The Morning Train (1999) and LakeGeneva (2003). He has also published The Proper Word: CollectedCriticism (2007) and (forthcoming) My Mother-City: A Memoir. He is a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin.

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Edna LongleyTo quote 'Snow': MacNeice's poetry is'more of it than we think,/ Incorrigiblyplural'. It reproduces the sensory assaultof existence 'On the tongue on the eyeson the ears in the palms of one's hands'.He turns this inside out to imagine 'not-being'. On its socio-political level, his poetry distinguishes in a uniquelysubtle way between what is owed to theindividual and what to the community,thus living up to the promise of hisstatement in 1935: 'The individualist is

an atom thinking about himself (Thank God I am not as other men);the communist, too often, is an atom having ecstasies of self-denial (Thank God I am one in a crowd).' On its metaphysical level, hispoetry faces the whole issue of the self in the world:

Windows between you and the worldKeep out the cold, keep out the fright;Then why does your reflection seemSo lonely in the moving night?('Corner Seat')

And on its aesthetic level, his poetry reconciles traditionalism andModernism. In a curious way MacNeice did more than othertwentieth-century poets to test poetry against the century. He testedit against the claims of politics and philosophy, against thepressures of cities and war. And he did not take the outcome of these tests, or of anything else, for granted.

From Louis MacNeice: A Critical Study (1988)

Edna LongleyOriginally from Dublin, Edna Longley moved to Belfast in 1963.She is an internationally recognised critic on modern Irish andBritish poetry, with works including studies of Louis MacNeice andEdward Thomas. She is now Professor Emerita at Queen’s UniversityBelfast (where she played a pivotal role in the creation of theSeamus Heaney Centre), a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a British Academy Fellow.

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Leontia FlynnWhen I think of Louis MacNeice'spoetry I tend to think about trains.'Trains came threading quietly throughmy dozing childhood,' he writes in'Trains in the Distance' and if trains alsothread their way through MacNeice'soeuvre, this is because, as he observesslyly in 'Train to Dublin', train-journeyingcomprises the greater part of existence:'. . . the trains carry us about. But not

consistently so, / For during a tiny portion of our lives we are not intrains . . . '. When it isn't trains it might be cars or taxis. In 'SundayMorning', 'Man's heart expands to tinker with his car', and 'afringe or two of the windy past' can be clutched from the speedingmotor, while later poems like 'Hold-up' and 'The Taxis' explicitlyfigure life as a weird ride in the back of a cab or on a bus.

It is this restless, journeying, perceiving aspect of MacNeice'spoetry that I love. Edna Longley has written that 'On itsmetaphysical level, his poetry faces the whole issue of the self in the world', citing his poem 'Corner Seat' as an example. Here the speaker's face is reflected in a train window:

Windows between you and the worldKeep out the cold, keep out the fright;Then why does your reflection seemSo lonely in the moving night?

If MacNeice's poetry brilliantly projects into language an image ofthe self on its trip through life, I also love the contemporary, particularfeel of the world through which he moves. Over the delicate lyricismof much- anthologised poems like 'The Sunlight in The Garden' and'Autobiography' – by which I first encountered his work – I came toprefer the urban busy-ness and crowdedness of 'Birmingham' and'Belfast'. There's a democracy to the breadth of observations in aMacNeice poem. The voice recording its impressions seemshistorically determined and politically aware, and his world-viewexplicitly encompasses both high and low culture. 'Bagpipe Music'famously finds him at the low end – and the vehicular image recursagain: 'It's no go the Yogi-man, it's no go Blavatsky, /All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi'.

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MacNeice's critics rightly stress his emphasis on flux and diversity.In 'Train to Dublin' the various kinds of people and experiencesobserved or imagined can scarcely be contained by the equallyjumbled, moving self:

Our half-thought thoughts divide in sifted wispsAgainst the basic facts repatterned without pause,I can no more gather my mind up in my fistThan the shadow of the smoke of this train upon the grass . . .

Part of MacNeice's legacy, I suppose, has been to show how acomplex intelligence might move within an equally complex history,responding to it. In terms of his ambivalent Northern Irishness(which I've never much cared about), I also like that his restlessnessundermines ideas of rootedness and rural permanence: trains are both part of the landscape and just as passing through. Finally though, I think it's the fluid patterning and 'repatterning' of his poetry that matters, and makes 'Train to Dublin' a thrillingjourney in language.

Leontia Flynn Leontia Flynn was born in County Down in 1974. In 2001 she wonan Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, These Days (2004),won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection of the Year) in 2004,and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. In the sameyear, she was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's 'NextGeneration' poets.

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Michael Longley

Glimpses of Louis MacNeiceAt Inst it was Joe Cowan, a dapper little Englishman with a pert moustache,who inspired in me (and, a little later, in Derek Mahon) a devotion to poetry.Thanks to the Unionist hegemony therewas little or no Irish literature on thesyllabus in the fifties. Joe Xeroxedpoems by living Irish writers, Kavanagh,MacNeice, Rodgers. He would hand

around the smudgy sheets. "Read that one aloud for us, Longley."I'd read MacNeice's 'Snow', say, or 'Sunday Morning' in a dimmonotone. "Is the man a poet? Is the man a poet? I should say so! I should say so!" And he'd chortle and slap his thigh.

In my Sixth Form year my Latin master Maurice Fowler was forcedto go away to hospital in England. His vivacious wife Marjorie tookhis place for a year or so. She and I became friends. About thistime she was getting to know Louis MacNeice, and raved abouthim. He clearly took to her and bestowed on her a name he thoughtsuited her better, Maggie. Ever afterwards she insisted that closefriends call her Maggie. She asked Louis to sign for me a copy ofAutumn Sequel (my least favourite MacNeice volume!). She told mehow hurt he had been by the negative reviews his books from thisperiod had been receiving; that he would like, he claimed, to beginhis life's work all over again.

Marjorie introduced me to her colleague at Victoria College, Mercy Hunter, and her husband the sculptor George McCann(Maguire in Autumn Sequel). George and Mercy told me that whenLouis came to Ireland to research programmes for the BBC, his visitsalmost invariably coincided with important rugby matches atRavenhill or Lansdowne Road. He refused to fly and preferred theLiverpool to Belfast steamer.

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"If he was going on to Dublin," Mercy explained, "I would cookhim a full Ulster Fry with two duck eggs and a naggin of Bushmills.Always the same." When George first brought Louis home, theirnew friend kept them up late drinking and talking and singing. He was having a break, but they both had teaching jobs and anearly start. Eventually Mercy suggested that they move Louis's campbed between her bed and George's. "Would that help? I askedhim." He went to bed when they did, and he slept. "When I wasfive the black dreams came; / Nothing after was quite the same."

Round about 1961 Derek Mahon gave a paper on MacNeice tothe Trinity College Philosophical Society. The honoured guest wasW. R. Rodgers, and in the audience sat Hedli MacNeice and herdaughter Corinna (Bimba). Louis had recently left Hedli for MaryWimbush, and Hedli had decamped from London to Kinsale whereshe opened her excellent seafood restaurant The Spinnaker, a pioneering enterprise in those days. I spoke to Derek's paper.Although Bertie Rodgers had drunk a good deal, he spoke brightlyabout MacNeice the poet and MacNeice the broadcaster. Hedliseemed pleased with the evening. I remember her walking arm inarm with Bertie towards Front Gate. Later in my rooms in BotanyBay Derek and I gave Bertie a mug of milky Nescafe. The nextmorning he was up by seven writing a piece for the NewStatesman. A year or so later Derek told me that MacNeice wasdrinking up the road in McDaid's. "Let's go and introduceourselves." I felt far too shy and uncertain. But Derek went. The account of their meeting is for him to tell.

A year or so after his death in September 1963 Derek Mahon,Seamus Heaney and I drove to MacNeice's grave in Carrowdorechurchyard among the drumlins of County Down. We dawdledbetween the graves, then signed the visitors' book, eachcontemplating an elegy. MacNeice's premature death at the age offifty-five had shocked us. We felt bereaved of a father-figure whom wehad only recently been getting to know. (Derek was the only one of uswho had met him personally.) The return of his ashes to Ireland didfeel like some kind of repatriation. When the three of us were nexttogether Derek took from his pocket 'In Carrowdore Churchyard' andread it aloud. Seamus started to recite his poem, then crumpled it up.I wisely decided then and there not to make the attempt. Derek hadproduced the definitive elegy: it brilliantly spans the poles ofMacNeice's imagination – colour and darkness, destruction andrebirth, the underworld and the earth's lovely surfaces:

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This, you implied, is how we ought to live –

The ironical, loving crush of roses against snow,Each fragile, solving ambiguity. SoFrom the pneumonia of the ditch, from the agueOf the blind poet and the bombed-out town you bringThe all-clear to the empty holes of spring;Rinsing the choked mud, keeping the colours new.

Michael LongleyBorn in Belfast and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, MichaelLongley’s distinguished poetry collections include No ContinuingCity (1969), Gorse Fires (1991) and Snow Water (2004). He wasawarded the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2000 and the Queen’s Medal forPoetry in 2001. He collaborated with Douglas Carson on BBCNIeducational programmes in the 1970s. Corner of the Eye, a BBCNIprofile of his life, was screened in 1988.

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Patricia CraigWhen I was at school in Belfast in the1950s, the received wisdom was thateverything worthwhile in a culturalsense had come from elsewhere.Literature was Milton and Keats,Wordsworth and W.H. Davies. Yeats inhis Celtic Twilight phase was just aboutaccepted, because the poems he wroteat that time were as far in spirit as onecould get from the grim North. I knew

nothing about W.R. Rodgers and his exhilarating refusal ofdourness, the intrepid local allegiances of John Hewitt, or thethoughtful, illuminating verses of poets like Robert Greacen and RoyMcFadden. And my ignorance extended beyond these and otherpoets: even Michael McLaverty, who taught in a school just up theroad from where I lived, was a closed book to me. At some level,though, I deplored this state of ignorance and was immenselyrelieved when it began to be amended – and the first local poet toaffect my literary awareness was indeed Louis MacNeice.

Not that it was right to describe him as a ‘local poet’ – I knew thatmuch. I knew of him first of all as a component of "MacSpaunday",the Auden-Spender-Day-Lewis-MacNeice quartet. But when I readand savoured lines like "I was born in Belfast between the mountainand the gantries", "the street children play on the wet/pavements,hopscotch and marbles", "the mill girls, the smell of porter, the salt-mines . . ." I felt the North had a special claim to him. No one else, I thought, had tackled the inheritances of Ulster with a comparable power and pungency – and it pleased me thatMacNeice's "mother city" was Belfast. He couldn't get away fromthat fact – and "cursed be he that curses his mother", he wrote –though much about the place appalled him. (He only relentstowards Belfast in the chapter in Zoo called "A PersonalDigression", in which a tinge of its allure at last becomes apparentto him.) Whatever distaste he felt for aspects of Ulster, though, he makes an invigorating business of their appraisal.

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For me, MacNeice was a heady discovery, back in 1960 orthereabouts, and I understood that it really didn't matter a jotwhether England, Ireland, Anglo-Ireland or Northern Ireland tookpossession of him. Try to pin him down under one heading, andhe'll quickly evade categorisation by veering off into another, in thebest way of the individualist or the shape-shifter. Snow and hugeroses, King Billy on a banner, preparations for war on Primrose Hill, a love affair in London: he takes it all in and imposes anastonishing beauty and urbanity on all of it. It's just a great piece of luck for Belfast that his life began here.

Patricia CraigBorn in Belfast, Patricia Craig is an acclaimed anthologist, editor,biographer and critic. Northern Irish life and literature has been herfocus in works such as The Rattle of the North: An Anthology ofUlster Prose (1992), The Belfast Anthology (1999) and The UlsterAnthology (2006). Her Brian Moore: A Biography (2002) isconsidered the definitive work on this Irish novelist.

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Peter McDonald

The NeighboursIn the single-bedroom flat I used to cry the night through as my mother walked the floor with me, rocked me and fed mepast the small, insensible hours, not to wake the neighbours;though often upstairs there might be half the Group Theatre going till daybreak – a tiny, bohemian airpocket: Jimmy Ellis (in the Group, before Z Cars), or Mary O'Malley, and over from next door, next door but one maybe, GeorgeMcCann, Mercy Hunter, John Boyd and the BBC, talking politics or shop, intrigue or gossip the night through:

but perhaps on this occasion there's only the babycutting in and out of silence in a high spare roomwhere the McCann's have just lodged their visiting poetwho by noon will cross from The Elbow Room to the studiosin Ormeau Avenue, and deliver his talk, unscripted,on 'Childhood Memories'; whose sleep now, if sleep it is,remains unbroken through the small, insensible hoursbetween the whiskey nightcap and a breakfast of whiskey.

Peter McDonaldBelfast-born poet and academic, Peter McDonald was educated atMethodist College in Belfast and University College, Oxford. His poetry collections include Biting the Wax (1989) and Pastorals(2004). He has published widely onLouis MacNeice and on contemporarypoets from Northern Ireland in worksincluding Mistaken Identities: Poetryand Northern Ireland (1997) and in2007 edited a new edition ofMacNeice’s Collected Poems. He iscurrently a tutor at Christ Church,Oxford, and a lecturer for the University.

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Seamus HeaneyBefore I encountered MacNeice'spoetry on the page, I'd heard it read bythe poet himself. The event must havebeen organized by the EnglishDepartment at Queen's University sometime around 1960/61, because Iremember going across to ElmwoodChurch with other Honours Englishstudents and hearing MacNeiceintroduced by Professor Butter.

But that, I'm afraid, is all I remember: a sense of occasion.

Still, when I graduated in 1961, MacNeice's Collected Poems1925–48 was among the volumes I bought with my first book token(others included the works of J.M. Synge and Oscar Wilde), andreading that book had a definite effect. Inspired by the example ofpoems like 'Belfast' and 'Birmingham' I wrote one called'Newcastle, Co. Down' which I submitted in longhand to theSunday Independent and which they luckily returned. Then, duringa postgraduate year at St Joseph's College of Education, 'SundayMorning' and 'Conversation' came up in a lecture by MaeveConway, and the following year I found myself teaching'Carrickfergus' as a prescribed poem to a group of GCE students in St Thomas's Intermediate School in Ballymurphy.

Soon after that I was able to organise my own reading ofMacNeice. John Sherlock, a colleague at St Joseph's (where I wasappointed in 1963), had acquired an interest in The ChimneyCorner Inn, out beyond Glengormley, and was eager to initiate aprogramme of cultural events. One of the first of these saw MichaelLongley and myself reading and introducing work by the nowdeceased poet. By then I had gone on a daytrip with my GCEstudents to explore MacNeice landmarks in Carrickfergus, andwould soon join Michael and Derek Mahon for a poets' pilgrimageto Carrowdore churchyard – whence his ashes 'will not stir'.

It had been The Burning Perch, published a few days afterMacNeice's untimely death in 1963, which made the big,immediate and lasting impression. From the abounding memory-source of 'Soap Suds' to the as-it-is-now-and-ever-shall-be mythic takeon 'Charon', the book had swiftness and inevitability and left anindelible mark.

Since then, MacNeice has been an abiding presence, larger andmore luminous as the years go by, his contribution increasinglyrecognized and his importance ever more verified by the criticaland creative work of poetic heirs who have flourished during thelast half century 'between the mountains and the gantries'. We have reached a point where MacNeice's time is not 'away and somewhere else', but here and now. And here and now themoment has been marked, appropriately and magnificently, by Peter McDonald's centenary edition of Collected Poems.

Seamus HeaneyFrom County Londonderry, Seamus Heaney was educated atQueen’s University Belfast. He taught at St Thomas’s IntermediateSchool, Belfast and later at QUB, Carysfort, Harvard and Oxford.His poetry collections include Death of a Naturalist (1966), North(1975) and Electric Light (2001) and his work has featured in manyBBC programmes including the 1970s schools’ series ‘Explorations’.He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.

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Terence BrownIn the late Fifties and early Sixties theNorthern Ireland Senior Certificate Englishsyllabus was partly based on a volumeentitled The Pageant of English Verse. A sturdy green hardback (I still keep myschool copy here in my office in TrinityCollege, Dublin) it offered substantialselections by an E.W. Parker of English-language poetry from the thirteenth totwentieth centuries.

In its later pages between W.H. Auden's 'O what is that Sound' andStephen Spender's 'The Express' appeared a single poem by one LouisMacNeice. That poem was 'Snow'. I remember how taken I was by itsblend of sensuous immediacy and mystery, its relish for 'the drunkennessof things being various' and its enigmatic final line (though I doubt Iwould have expressed the matter quite like that back then). Oddlyenough, nobody told me that MacNeice was a local man and it wasonly at university that I learnt that the poet had grown up inCarrickfergus, across the Belfast Lough from where I spent my ownHolywood childhood, like him hearing the sound of ships' sirens in thenight and the heavy breathing of steam trains which wended their wayto and from Belfast along the lough shore in Counties Antrim and Down.

As I got to know MacNeice's body of work, and when as a graduatestudent I began to prepare a thesis on him, I came to feel that thatpoem was one with special claims on the Ulster reader in a provincewhere the pleasures of the senses were often enough under puritansuspicion and understood that its zest for a world which is 'Incorrigiblyplural' was an insouciant rebuke to those who would categorizeexperience, and sometimes their fellow citizens, all too readily. I sensed the poem had introduced me with panache and style to theliberating possibilities of difference and for that I still feel grateful.

Terence Brown Born in China, Terence Brown was educated in County Down, at MageeUniversity College, Derry and at Trinity College, Dublin, where he is nowProfessor of Anglo-Irish literature and a Senior Fellow. A member of theRoyal Irish Academy and of Academia Europaea, he has lectured andpublished extensively on Irish literature and cultural history. Hispublications include Louis MacNeice: Sceptical Vision (1974) andIreland: a Social and Cultural History, 1922–79 (1981).61


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Glenn PattersonIn November 1998 Queen’s University’sthen writer-in-residence, Colin Teevandecided to mark the diamond jubilee of Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal byorganising a reading of the poem in itsentirety, with this twist: each of thetwenty-four cantos was to be deliveredby a different reader. He invited poets,prose writers, playwrights, politicians,critics, clergymen and actors to

participate. I was fortunate enough to be still hanging around theuniversity, doing a bit of teaching, having been writer-in-residencemyself until the previous year. (Some would say I am still hangingaround there, although now with the fig leaf of a contract.) I gotwind of Colin’s plans at an early stage and laid claim to Canto IV,the one which begins, ‘September has come and I awake . . . ’ and which includes some of the greatest writing about love, and desire, in the English language: ‘all of London littered withremembered kisses’, and all that.

We had, that autumn of 1998, already had the Good FridayAgreement, although not yet the first attempt at devolution. There was still a deal of suspicion. (Proceeds from the MacNeiceevent went to the Omagh Memorial Trust, which tells you all youneed to know about where we were then.) Looking back, however,remembering the easy mix of people in the foyer of the Harty Roomafter the reading, people as they say here of all politicalpersuasions (including that great persuasion known as None), I can’t help thinking of the event as a pointer to the future, which isto say to our present and the search for cultural, if not political,common ground.

The Belfast playwright Owen McCafferty once told me the toughest question he had ever been asked: ‘What is the one play inthe last fifty years we could not have done without?’ Not ‘yourfavourite’, or even necessarily ‘the best’, ‘the one we could not havedone without’.

I have found myself ever since asking the same question about allmanner of things. It is addictive and, of course, every bit assubjective as ‘favourite’ and ‘best’. Yet when it comes to NorthernIreland and Poets We Could Not Have Done Without it is difficult to imagine how anyone could rival MacNeice for the title. And ifyou doubt me, think of three of the other contenders – Heaney,Longley, Mahon – gathered as young men at his grave inCarrowdore; think of two of the others – Carson and Muldoon –with their nods to ‘Snow’. Actually, just think of ‘Snow’: ‘World iscrazier and more of it than we think/Incorrigibly plural’.

Beat that for a revelation, a manifesto, a guide for living, here oranywhere else.

Glenn Patterson Born in Belfast, Glenn Patterson studied at the University of EastAnglia, taking a Creative Writing MA under the tutelage ofMalcolm Bradbury. Returning to Northern Ireland in 1988, he tookthe post of writer-in-the-community for Lisburn/Craigavon and hassince been writer-in-residence at the Universities of Cork, EastAnglia and Queen's University Belfast. His first novel Burning Your Own (1988) won a Betty Trask Award and the Rooney Prize;subsequent novels include The International (1999) and the recentThat Which Was (2004). Lapsed Protestant, a collection of his non-fiction, was published in 2006.

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Select Biography

Auden, W.H. (1907–1973)Widely considered one of the major twentieth century poets,Wystan Hugh Auden's extensive output covered a vast rangeof verse forms. His decision to leave England for America in1939 at the outbreak of the Second World War causedcontroversy. In death his reputation has flourished, someliterary historians describing him as the 'first writer of thepostmodern period'.

Bell, Sam Hanna (1909–1990)A Features Producer for the BBC’sNorthern Ireland Home Service(subsequently BBCNI), Sam HannaBell, through his work with the OutsideBroadcasting Unit, was pivotal indocumenting rural working-class life inUlster. He was also an acclaimednovelist, with December Bride (1951)his most famous work.

Betjeman, John (1906–1984)Poet, critic and broadcaster. A prolific writer, by the 1950sJohn Betjeman was a well-known figure, publishing regularly inbooks and magazines. He was also a popular broadcaster,making frequent radio and television appearances, oftendiscussing one, or both, of his twin passions – architecture andrailways. He was knighted in 1969 and in 1972 wasappointed Poet Laureate.

Boyd, John (1912–2002)From 1947 Boyd was the Talks Producer for the BBC’sNorthern Ireland Home Service. The first producer of regulararts programmes on BBC Radio in Northern Ireland, hisdocumentaries profiled Irish writers including Louis MacNeiceand Seamus Heaney. Boyd was also a playwright, memoiristand, in retirement, advisor to the Lyric Theatre.

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Briggs, Asa (1921–)A renowned historian of Victorian Britain, Briggs is alsowidely regarded as 'the most important broadcastinghistorian in Britain'. His five-volume The History ofBroadcasting in the United Kingdom charts the story of theBBC from its inception in 1922 (Birth of Broadcasting, 1961)through to the mid-Seventies and the increased threat to theBBC from independent television (Competition, 1995).

Britten, Benjamin (1913–1976)Prodigiously gifted, Benjamin Britten isconsidered one of the finest composersof the twentieth century. Hispenultimate opera Owen Wingrave(1971) is amongst his most famousworks. Manipulating the mass mediumof television, this BBC broadcast wasseen and heard in at least thirteencountries by a global audience.

Clark, Eleanor (1913–1996)American novelist and non-fiction writer. In 1939 she andMacNeice met and fell in love; however, their relationshipwould not last. Clark later married the American writer RobertPenn Warren. Her book The Oysters of Locmariaquer receivedthe National Book Award for Arts and Letters in 1965.

Cusack, Cyril (1910–1993)From his debut in Fred O'Donovan'sKnocknagow (1918) to a role inDanny, the Champion of the World(1991), Cyril Cusack enjoyed thelongest screen career of any British-based performer. However, it was as astage actor that he was perhaps mostesteemed, performing to great acclaimin over sixty productions in the AbbeyTheatre in the 1930s and 1940s.

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Gilliam, Laurence (1907–1964)A critically acclaimed radio producer,Laurence Duval Gilliam joined the BBCDrama Department in 1933. In 1936he was given responsibility forFeatures, a pioneering form ofbroadcasting which blended sound,words, and music together to create anaural picture. His work in Featuresduring the Second World War earned

him an OBE. Throughout the post-war period – the 'goldenage of radio' – Gilliam did more than anyone else in theBBC to recruit and encourage poets and writers to contributework for the BBC Features Department.

Gorham, Maurice (1902–1975)An Irish journalist and broadcastingexecutive, Maurice Gorham workedfor eight years as General Editor of the Radio Times before transferring in1941 into broadcasting proper andbecoming Director of the BBC's NorthAmerican Services. He went on toenjoy a long and distinguished careerat the BBC, serving variously as

Director of the Light Programme and Television Service. He left the BBC in 1947 and later served for several years as Director of Broadcasting at Radio Éireann.

Larkin, Philip (1922–1985)English poet, novelist, jazz critic andlibrarian. Almost immediately aftergraduating from Oxford, Larkin beganhis career as a librarian. Hisbreakthrough as a poet arrived in the1950s during a period as Sub-Librarian at Queen's UniversityBelfast. In 1955 he became Librarianat Hull University, a position he held

until his death. That same year saw the publication of The69

Day-Lewis, Cecil (1904–1972)The poet and novelist Cecil Day-Lewis was born atBallintubbert, Queen's County, Ireland. Along with W.H.Auden, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender he was partof the Oxford poets' circle of the 1920s. With his translationof Virgil's Georgics (1940) and his own verse collectionsWord Over All (1943) and Poems, 1943–1947 (1948) heachieved his full stature as a poet. Whilst poetry was his truevocation, Day-Lewis, under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake,also wrote detective novels. In 1951, the year in which hisBBC commissioned translation of Virgil's Aeneid wasbroadcast as part of the Festival of Britain, he was electedOxford professor of poetry. In 1968, he became the firstIrish-born Poet Laureate since Nahum Tate (1652–1715).

Dodds, E.R. (1893–1979)Born in Banbridge, County Down, Dodds was a classicalscholar. An often controversial figure, he was asked to leaveOxford in 1916 for supporting the Easter Rising. However, he returned the following year to take his Greatsexamination, obtaining a First. He subsequently taught inDublin and Reading before being appointed to a chair ofGreek in the University of Birmingham. He appointedMacNeice as lecturer in Greek in 1930. In 1936 he becameRegius Professor of Greek at Oxford. A lifelong interest in theparanormal culminated with Dodds becoming President ofthe Society for Psychical Research from 1961 to 1963.

Eliot, T.S. (1888–1965)First published in 1915, The Love Songof J. Alfred Prufrock marked the start ofThomas Stearns Eliot's influential poetrycareer. The Waste Land (1922)secured his reputation as one of thetwentieth century's major poets. In1925 he became Literary Editor ofFaber & Gwyer (later Faber & Faber),in which role he would cultivate and

promote younger writers, such as MacNeice, and define thenext forty years of British poetry.

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Less Deceived, the collection that would make his name as a poet. The Whitsun Weddings (1964) set the seal onLarkin's reputation. High Windows (1974) was the last bookof poems to be published in Larkin's lifetime.

Motion, Andrew (1952–)The English poet, novelist and broadcaster Andrew Motion readEnglish at University College, Oxford. He has held a number ofprestigious posts including that of Editor of Poetry Review andPoetry Editor and Editorial Director at London publishers Chatto& Windus. He became Poet Laureate in 1999.

Muldoon, Paul (1951–)Born in County Armagh and educatedat Queen's University Belfast, PaulMuldoon worked as a radio andtelevision producer for BBCNI from1973 to 1986 and was responsiblefor landmark arts broadcasts includingIrish Poetry and Bazaar. Since 1987he has lived in the USA where he iscurrently the Howard G. B. Clark '21Professor at Princeton University. Hiscollections of poetry include New

Weather (1973), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987),Hay (1998), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002) and HorseLatitudes (2006). He has been the recipient of numerousawards including the Pulitzer Prize (2003) and the 2006European Prize for Poetry.

Ogilvie, F.W. (1893–1949)Oxford-educated, Frederick WolffOgilvie was reading for literaehumaniores when the First World Warbroke out. Within two days he was inthe forces. He was seriously woundedand lost his left arm in 1915, butremained in the army until the end ofthe war. In 1919 he returned toEngland and life as an academic

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and educationalist, first at Oxford, then Edinburgh and, in1934, Belfast, where he became President and Vice-Chancellor of Queen's University. He left Belfast in 1938 to succeed Sir John Reith and become the second DirectorGeneral of the BBC. His reign at the BBC was described as 'short, stormy and in some ways calamitous'. Ogilvieresigned in 1942 and in 1944 became principal of JesusCollege, Oxford.

Olivier, Laurence (1907–1989)Considered by many to be the finest actor of the twentiethcentury, Olivier made his name as a stage actor performingclassical roles. As a screen actor he helped makeShakespeare available to a mass audience and was twelvetimes nominated for an Academy Award. In later years heplayed a pivotal role in the establishment of an EnglishNational Theatre.

Robertson, Charles Grant (1869–1948)An historian and academic administrator, Robertson wastutor at Exeter College (1895-99) and at Magdalen College(1905-20). In 1920 he was appointed Principal ofBirmingham University, later serving as its Vice-Chancellorfrom 1927 until his retirement in 1938.

Rodgers, William Robert (1909–1969)The poet-broadcaster W.R. (Bertie) Rodgers was born andbrought up in Ballymacarrett, east Belfast. He was educatedat Queen's University Belfast where he took a second-classhonours degree in English (1927–31). He trained for thePresbyterian ministry and, in 1935, was ordained andappointed minister of Cloveneden Church, Loughgall, CountyArmagh. Rodgers began writing poetry in 1938; his firstcollection Awake! and other Poems was published in 1941.In 1946 Rodgers resigned his ministry to join the BBC inLondon, having been recruited by Louis MacNeice for theFeatures Department. A second collection of poetry, EuropaAnd The Bull, appeared in 1952.

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Spender, Stephen (1909–1995)Educated at University College,Oxford, where he met LouisMacNeice and W.H. Auden,Stephen Spender left universitywithout taking a degree andwent to Berlin in 1930. Hisbreakthrough collection Poemswas published in 1933. He tooka keen interest in politics,variously declaring himself to bea socialist and pacifist. In 1937

he travelled to Spain. His experiences during the SpanishCivil War inspired some of his finest anti-war poetry. In laterlife Spender was Professor of English at University College,London (1970–77), and later Professor Emeritus.

Stallworthy, Jon (1935–)Poet, critic, scholar and biographer, Stallworthy is the authorof the definitive MacNeice biography, Louis MacNeice(Faber & Faber, 1995). A Fellow of the British Academy andof the Royal Society of Literature, he is Acting President ofWolfson College, Oxford.

Strindberg, Johan August (1849–1912)Swedish playwright, novelist, painter and short-story writer,Strindberg's works combined psychology and naturalism. A literary innovator, his work represented a new kind ofEuropean drama and the evolution towards Expressionistdrama. Along with Ibsen, he is considered one ofScandinavia's greatest writers.

Thwaite, Anthony (1930–)An acclaimed writer and poet, Anthony Thwaite worked as aProducer in the BBC Features Department in the early 1960s. His later roles including Literary Editor of The Listener,Assistant Professor of English at the University of Libya,Henfield Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia,Literary Editor of the New Statesman, and co-editor of

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Encounter from 1973 to 1985. He was awarded the OBE in 1990 for services to poetry.

Vaughan-Thomas, Wynford(1908–1987)Welsh journalist and broadcaster,Wynford Vaughan-Thomas joinedthe BBC in the mid-1930s. He established his reputation as a correspondent during World WarTwo with notable reports includingthose from an RAF Lancaster duringa night raid over Berlin and fromthe Anzio beachhead, as well asthe liberations of Rome and theBelsen concentration camp. Theclosing stages of the war found himin Hamburg, broadcasting from thestudio which William Joyce, Lord

Haw-Haw, had been using only days before. After the war hereported on Indian Independence (1947) and was a leadingcommentator on state occasions, most notably the wedding ofPrincess Elizabeth to the Duke of Edinburgh.

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Picture Credits

Page Picture2 1 © BBC7 2 © MacNeice Collection – Carrickfergus Borough Council8 3 © MacNeice Collection – Carrickfergus Borough Council9 4 © MacNeice Collection – Carrickfergus Borough Council10 5 © MacNeice Collection – Carrickfergus Borough Council11 6 Image courtesy of Corinna MacNeice12 7 © BBC12 8 © MacNeice Collection – Carrickfergus Borough Council13 9 Image courtesy of Corinna MacNeice13 10 © Faber & Faber14 11 Image courtesy of Corinna MacNeice15 12 © MacNeice Collection – Carrickfergus Borough Council16 13 © Faber & Faber18 14 © Faber & Faber19 15 © BBC20 16 © BBC21 17 © BBC21 18 © BBC22 19 © BBC23 20 © BBC23 21 © BBC24 22 © BBC24 23 © Faber & Faber25 24 © BBC26 25 © Faber & Faber26 26 Image Courtesy of Corinna MacNeice27 27 © BBC27 28 © BBC28 29 © BBC29 30 © BBC29 31 © BBC30 32 © Getty Images31 33 © BBC31 34 © MacNeice Collection – Carrickfergus Borough Council32 35 Image courtesy of Corinna MacNeice32 36 © Getty Images33 37 Image courtesy of Corinna MacNeice © Lotte Meitner-Graf34 38 Image courtesy of Corinna MacNeice34 39 © Studio Canal35 40 © BBC35 41 Image courtesy of Corinna MacNeice © Lotte Meitner-Graf 36 42 © BBC37 43 © BBC38 44 © Faber & Faber39 45 © BBC

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Acknowledgements

Editorial Advisory Committee: Edna Longley, Anne Tannahill, Ian Sansom and Glenn Patterson

Reseach and Production: Francis JonesExecutive Producer: Mark Adair

BBCNI wishes to thank all of those who have assisted in the development ofthis exhibition, including: Vic Gray at Faber & Faber, Helen Rankin atCarrickfergus Museum, Alice Williams at David HighamAssociates, Corinna MacNeice, Trish Hayes, Ken Anderson, Hugh Odling-Smee, Gavin Boyd, Douglas Carson, Jonathan Allison, Barnaby Perkins,David Huddleston and all the staff at The Ulster Folk & TransportMuseum, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, BBC PhotoUnit and BBC Written Archives at Caversham.

Design: Genesis Advertising Ltd

39 46 © Faber & Faber40 47 Image courtesy of Corinna MacNeice41 48 © MacNeice Collection – Carrickfergus Borough Council42 49 © BBC43 50 © BBC44 51 © BBC46 52 © Jude MacLaverty48 53 © John Minihan50 54 Image courtesy of Edna Longley51 55 © Amelia Stein52 56 © Adrian Tighe54 57 © Kelvin Boyes57 58 Image courtesy of Patricia Craig59 59 Image courtesy of Peter McDonald60 60 © BBC62 61 Image courtesy of Terence Brown64 62 © Michael Donald66 63 © BBC67 64 © BBC67 65 © BBC68 66 © BBC69 67 © BBC69 68 © BBC69 69 © BBC70 70 © BBC70 71 © BBC72 72 © BBC73 73 © BBC


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Select Bibliography

Boyd, John, The Middle Of My Journey(Blackstaff Press, 1991)

Brown, Terence, Louis MacNeice: Sceptical Vision (Gill & Macmillan, 1975)

Coulton, Barbara, Louis MacNeice in theB.B.C. (Faber & Faber, 1980)

Longley, Edna, Louis MacNeice: A Study (Faber & Faber, 1988)

Longley, Michael, ed. Selected Poems (Faber & Faber, 2005)

MacNeice, Louis, The Strings Are False (Faber & Faber, 1996)

McDonald, Peter, ed. Collected Poems (Faber & Faber, 2007)

McDonald, Peter, Louis MacNeice: The PoetIn His Contexts (Clarendon Press, 1991)

McMahon, Sean, Sam Hanna Bell: A Biography (Blackstaff Press, 1999)

Stallworthy, Jon, Louis MacNeice (Faber & Faber, 1995)

Wills, Clair, That Neutral Island (Faber & Faber, 2007)


visitations - bbcdownloads.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/northernireland/bbcni...yorkshire and delhi. in...

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