Louis MacNeice and the Irish poetry of his time This study focuses on Louis MacNeices creative and critical engagement with other Irish poets during his lifetime. It draws on extensive archival research to uncover the previously unrecognised extent of the poets contact with Irish literary mores and networks. Poetic dialogues with contemporaries including F.R. Higgins John Hewitt W.R. Rodgers Austin Clarke Patrick Kavanagh John Montague and Richard Murphy are traced against the persistent rhetoric of cultural and geographical attachment at large in Irish poetry and criticism during the period. These comparative readings are framed by accounts of MacNeices complex relationship with the oeuvre of W.B. Yeats which forms a meta narrative to MacNeices broader engagement with Irish poetry. Yeats is shown to have been MacNeices contemporary in the 1930s reading and reacting to the younger poets work just as MacNeice read and reacted to the older poets work.0But the ongoing challenge of the intellectual and formal complexity of Yeatss poetry also provided a means through which MacNeice across his whole career dialectically developed various modes through which to confront modernitys cultural political and philosophical challenges. This book offers new and revisionary perspectives on MacNeices work and its relationship to Irelands literary traditions as well as making an innovative contribution to the history of Irish literature and anglophone poetry in the twentieth century