John Edward Masefield was born on 1 June 1878 in Ledbury, Herefordshire, a market town on the borderlands of England and Wales, and died on 12 May 1967 at Abingdon, then in Berkshire. During his long life he became one of Britain’s most recognizable poets: a writer of sailors, fields, foxhunts, village sinners, mythic heroes, children’s dreams, national ceremonies, and private grief. He was also a novelist, playwrigh…
“The world is round, and the place which may seem like the end may also be the beginning.”
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Georgian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder
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…
“Others can tell lies more efficiently; no one except the poet can give us poetic truth.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Irish Poets, Modernist Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Fear, Longing, Despair
