Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast, the son of a Church of Ireland clergyman who supported Home Rule; his presence recurs in MacNeice's poems. “The real strength and warmth of Louis' feeling for his father, deeper than all irritations ”, E. R. Dodds writes, is apparent in poems such as “Woods”, which begins, “My father who found the English landscape tame”. Of equal importance for the young MacNeice was his mother, who, like his father, came from the west of Ireland, which became for MacNeice as for Yeats an image of the good place. MacNeice's mother suffered gynaecological problems, a mental breakdown, which meant she left the family to go into a nursing-home in 1913, and, finally, death from tuberculosis a year later. The loss of his mother at such an early age had a…
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Citation: O'Neill, Michael. "Louis MacNeice". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 July 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2868, accessed 21 November 2024.]
