Plastic and reflections of industry in the poetry of Louis MacNeice, Derek Mahon and Leontia Flynn

The poem seeks to represent the performativity of the worker on the page and is presented in time-stamped sections, which serves to highlight the claustrophobia of the working condition.<br><br>The critical component explores how the poetry of Louis MacNeice, Derek Mahon, and Leontia Flynn reflects industry, tracing a literary arc from mid-twentieth-century mechanisation through late-industrial decline to the digital present.<br><br>Though writing in markedly different contexts, MacNeice, Mahon and Flynn interrogate the transformations wrought by industrial and technological change, offering a layered critique of modernity.

MacNeice, writing during the 1930s and postwar periods, presents industrialism as both a symbol of alienation and an emblem of collective striving, reflecting a conflicted response to modern urban life. Mahon, shaped by the industrial decline of Northern Ireland, engages with dereliction and obsolescence, often framing industrial ruins as meditative spaces that register cultural loss and environmental decay, which, similarly to MacNeice, also reflects a conflicted response.