Camden New Journal - Letters: A fitting tribute to the late, great Louis MacNeice

Publications by New Journal Enterprises

Home

Archive

Competition

Camden New Journal - LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Published: 04 October 2007

A fitting tribute to the late, great Louis MacNeice

• THANK you for the excellent double feature on Louis MacNeice, the centenary of whose birth has not been sufficiently recognised.
MacNeice was one of the finest British poets of the twentieth century and deserves far greater recognition than he is generally given.
On a small matter of detail, Margaret Gardiner was over-romanticising when she described Louis as a typical Connemara type. In fact, the MacNeices were Anglo Irish Protestants from County Sligo and Louis’ grandfather, who married a Cork girl, became a schoolmaster who was sent to Connemara to run a mission school there. Although Louis’ mother lived in Clifden, she was not from a Connemara family.
Louis himself was born in Northern Ireland, as the beginning of his poem ‘Carrickfergus’ attests:
I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries
To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams.
On a local note, Louis first met Nancy Coldstream when he was introduced to her by W.H. Auden. They subsequently ran into each other while walking on the Heath, and the affair took off from there. Like the Coldstreams, Auden lived in Upper Park Road in 1936.
Tim Sanders
St. Albans Road, NW5

Send your letters to: The Letters Editor, Camden New Journal, 40 Camden Road, London, NW1 9DR or email to letters@camdennewjournal.co.uk. The deadline for letters is midday Tuesday. The editor regrets that anonymous letters cannot be published, although names and addresses can be withheld. Please include a full name, postal address and telephone number. Letters may be edited for reasons of space.

Comment on this article.
(You must supply your full name and email address for your comment to be published)

Name:

Email:

Comment: