Christina McCambridge

Louis MacNeice and America

My research examines the influence of the United States on the poetry and aesthetic imaginary of Louis MacNeice (1907-1963). It examines his formative readings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and T.S. Eliot, before tracing intertextual allusions and lines of reciprocal influence between MacNeice and his American contemporaries, including Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and E.E. Cummings. Combining formal analysis with revisionary archival research, it seeks to map, for the first time, the poet’s critical reception in the US.

By uncovering hidden transatlantic contexts for MacNeice’s work that have not yet received critical attention, this research aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of Irish-American literary crosscurrents of the mid-twentieth century, when questions vital to MacNeice’s practice – questions of art’s status, function, and form amidst historical crisis – were coming to a head on an international scale.

Transatlanticism, Modernism, Poetics