January 2009
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56 Reads
The ‘two-fold allegiance’ that shadowed Elizabeth Hamilton was also a defining element in the life and imagination of Louis MacNeice (1907–1963). The cry heard in the following extract from his autobiography — ‘Oh this division of allegiance!’ — reverberates throughout much of his work. MacNeice’s poetic vision has long been recognised as double-edged, his creativity sourced in a displacement that was ‘pre-natal’.1 Born in Belfast and raised in Carrickfergus, where his father, a Church of Ireland bishop, ministered, MacNeice’s unhappy childhood led him to mythologise the west of Ireland, where his parents came from, as his ‘true’ home. Yet he was never more than a visitor in the west, despite his rapturous response to the Connacht landscape. Nor did he ever seriously contemplate settling there. Education, career and artistic milieu anchored him in England, where he lived from the age of ten, first as a student at Sherborne, Marlborough and Oxford, then as a university lecturer in Birmingham and London in the 1930s, and finally as a London-based writer-producer for the BBC from 1941 until his death. Yet England was never fully home to MacNeice. London retained its foreignness, even after 20 years of residence, whereas Dublin was ever familiar, despite his conviction that the city ‘will not / Have me, alive or dead’.2 His uneasy sense of in-betweenness is memorably encapsulated in a line from a 1948 letter to his friend Eric Dodds, himself an uprooted Ulsterman: ‘I wish one could either live in Ireland or feel oneself in England.’3