MacNeice, (Frederick) Louis

MacNeice, (Frederick) Louis (1907–63), poet, born in Belfast, educated at Merton College, Oxford, where he made the acquaintance of Auden and Spender, and published a book of poems, Blind Fireworks (1929). He became known as a poet through his contributions to New Verse and his Poems (1935). Letters from Iceland (1937) was written in collaboration with Auden. Subsequent volumes of poetry include The Earth Compels (1938); Autumn Journal (1938), a long personal and political meditation on the events leading up to Munich; Plant and Phantom (1941); Springboard (1944); Holes in the Sky (1948); Autumn Sequel (1954); and The Burning Perch (1963).

His early work revealed a technical virtuosity, a painter's eye for an image, humour, and an impulse towards making sense of what he later called the ‘drunkenness of things being various’. He used most of the classic verse forms, but his distinctive contribution was his deployment of assonance, internal rhymes, and half rhymes, and ballad-like repetitions that he had absorbed from the Irishry of his childhood. He was also renowned as an outstanding writer of radio documentaries and radio parable plays; these include Christopher Columbus (1944) and his most powerful dramatic work, The Dark Tower (1947). Among his other works are a translation of an abridged version of Goethe's Faust (1951), and Varieties of Parable (from the 1963 Clark lectures) and a volume of autobiography, The Strings are False (both in 1965). His Collected Poems, edited by E. R. Dodds, appeared in 1966. See Louis MacNeice by J. Stallworthy (1995).