‘Felt Routes’

In ‘Ode’ (1935), Louis MacNeice writes of the necessity to ‘become the migrating bird following felt routes…And without soaring or swerving win by ignoring / The endlessly curving sea and so come to one’s home’. Much has been written about MacNeice’s search for ‘home’, his fraught relationship with Ulster, Ireland, and England, and about the difficulty of his ‘place’ within either Irish or English literary traditions. John Kerrigan has suggested that MacNeice might be seen more productively as a ‘self-consciously archipelagic’ poet: ‘more of his qualities are visible if he is thought about in the context of what the Good Friday Agreement calls “the totality of relationships among the peoples of these islands”’. This chapter explores MacNeice’s work in the 1930s, in particular, for its preoccupations with the meanings of islands and shorelines, and with the possibilities and restrictions they posed for re-imagining social and cultural life.