Louis MacNeice was born on 12 September 1907 in Belfast, the youngest child of John Frederick MacNeice and Elizabeth Margaret Clesham. His father was a Church of Ireland clergyman who would later become a bishop, and the family moved shortly after Louis's birth to Carrickfergus, on the northern shore of Belfast Lough, where the boy grew up in the rectory beneath the squat Norman keep of the castle. It was an apparent…
“The poet, I consider, is both critic and entertainer (and his criticism will cut no ice unless he entertains).”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Irish Poets, Modernist Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Fear, Longing, Despair
Philip Arthur Larkin (1922-1985) stands as one of the most significant English poets of the post-war era, a writer whose unflinching observations of ordinary life and masterful technical skill earned him a place among the finest poets of the 20th century. Often labeled as the "saddest heart in the post-war supermarket," Larkin crafted verse that captured the disillusionment and quiet desperation of modern Britain wit…
“Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.”
Neighbourhood:
Confessional Poets, Death & Mortality
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
