This chapter explores the submerged yet generative relationship of influence between the poetries of Louis MacNeice (1907-63) and Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) – two major Northern Irish poets of very different backgrounds and primary aesthetic dispositions. Notwithstanding their respective signature identifications with modernity, flux and hybridity on the one hand and tradition, continuity and community on the other, the chapter proposes that Heaney turns to MacNeice in order to seek out new directions for his own growth as artist. The chapter centrally argues that these two poets share a common concern with renewing the relationship between immutable reality and the alterity of dream-life. In consequence, their engagements with territorial conflict lead both poets to open vital space for non-conformity with the totalizing logic of enforced national destiny. Within this space, MacNeice and Heaney offer a linked vision of creativity renewed rather than foreclosed through recognizing human frailty in the face of mortality.

Chaucer’s God considers how characters invoke God, both in terms of the everyday language of late medieval England and in the ways that the idea of God is reflected in Chaucer’s fiction. Conventional, non-theological utterances of the names for God by Chaucer’s characters as part of their, by turns, outwardly pious and unthinkingly impious phraseologies are discussed in the opening section, God Woot – ‘God knows’. Under the heading God Forwoot – ‘God foreknows’, some of the more challenging invocations of God are considered, such as the implications of divine foreknowledge and predestination on human free will in the Knight’s Tale, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. The concluding section, God in a Cruel World, asks whether in the Clerk’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale, if Chaucer allowed his tales to reflect, and characters to reflect upon, the heretical notion of a God lacking in compassion for humanity.

Chaucer’s God considers how characters invoke God, both in terms of the everyday language of late medieval England and in the ways that the idea of God is reflected in Chaucer’s fiction. Conventional, non-theological utterances of the names for God by Chaucer’s characters as part of their, by turns, outwardly pious and unthinkingly impious phraseologies are discussed in the opening section, God Woot – ‘God knows’. Under the heading God Forwoot – ‘God foreknows’, some of the more challenging invocations of God are considered, such as the implications of divine foreknowledge and predestination on human free will in the Knight’s Tale, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. The concluding section, God in a Cruel World, asks whether in the Clerk’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale, if Chaucer allowed his tales to reflect, and characters to reflect upon, the heretical notion of a God lacking in compassion for humanity.