“If war is the test of reality, then all poetry is unreal; but in that…” — Louis MacNeice

“If war is the test of reality, then all poetry is unreal; but in that case unreality is a virtue.”

Written after the outbreak of war, defending both escapist and realist verse · Book, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1941)

About Louis MacNeice

12 September 1907–3 September 1963

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…

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