Alfred Noyes was born on 16 September 1880 in Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, and died on 25 June 1958 at his home on the Isle of Wight. During the first decades of the twentieth century he was among the best-known English poets in the world: a writer whose books sold widely, whose recitations drew large audiences, and whose poems entered schools, anthologies, music halls, and family memory. He was celebrated above all…
“Science has accomplished marvels for the material comforts of mankind, but it has been divorced from philosophy and it has misled the world by suggesting that the greater values can be produced by the less.”
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Tenderness
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…
“If war is the test of reality, then all poetry is unreal; but in that case unreality is a virtue.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Irish Poets, Modernist Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Fear, Longing, Despair
