Giving those angry ghosts their due : Louis McNeice's intertextual dialogue with W. B. Yeats

Abstract

This thesis examines the nature and significance of Louis MacNeice’s engagement with W.B. Yeats. Throughout the 1930s, and the early years of the 1940s, MacNeice sought to evaluate Yeats’s legacy. His preoccupation with Yeats was partly attributable to the fact that during many of these years his concerns and work overlapped with those of Yeats. However, this thesis will also take into account some of the effects of that relationship on MacNeice’s later writings. This thesis will devote a great deal of attention to MacNeice’s prose writings, through which his relationship with Yeats was largely constructed, and in particular his full-length study The Poetry of W.B. Yeats. It will also examine the ways in which Yeats’s influence is manifest in MacNeice’s poetic art in the context of that prose engagement.