BBC NI Learning - Writing Home website - profile of Louis MacNeice

Glenn Patterson's favourite Northern Irish author has been described as one of the brightest and most talented poets of the twentieth century. This brilliant Ulster man captured the essence of those rare fleeting moments when everything seems to come together, to make sense.

INTRODUCTION

Glenn Patterson was just seventeen when he first heard the poem Snow. He said it was like a light coming on, and that‘If this is what writing could do, I wanted to be a writer.’

Snow is one of the twentieth century’s best short lyric poems. Today its author, Irish-born Louis MacNeice, is enjoying renewed favour. Belfast born author Glenn Patterson traces the life of Louis MacNeice, from his birth in Belfast and childhood in Carrickfergus through to his brilliant academic and professional career. So why don't you learn more about the links between Louis MacNeice and Northern Ireland?

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
a tangerine and spit the pips and feel
the drunkenness of things being various.

from Snow

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