Louis MacNeice’s Remote Houses

Abstract

Houses at the peaceable north-western edges of Europe appear in several of MacNeice’s poems from the tumultuous second half of the 1930s, including ‘The Hebrides’, ‘Iceland’ and ‘The Coming of War’ (a series of poems set in Ireland). Though the remote houses in his poems seem unlikely locations for engagements with wider issues, this article argues that MacNeice’s depictions of these private spaces reflect his own self-questioning about matters that include the ascendancy of rapacious, acquisitive materialism and the responsibilities engendered by the rise of European fascism. This article suggests that, while the houses that MacNeice depicts in England during the same years are both more closely linked to materialism and more vulnerable to war, remote houses represent the possibility of a necessary and salutary perspective on wider events. As such, remote houses, and especially ones in Ireland, are significant points.