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Louis MacNeice
‐
Poet and broadcaster
Other names
Frederick Louis MacNeice
Place of birth
Place of death
St Leonard's Hospital, Shoreditch, London
About
Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast to John Frederick MacNeice and Elizabeth Margaret MacNeice. He was sent to preparatory school in Sherborne, England in 1917, then attended Marlborough College in 1921 and Merton College, Oxford in 1926. At Oxford he met writers W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender. In 1930, his final year at Oxford, he was awarded a First in literae humaniores, edited Oxford Poetry with Stephen Spender and published his first book of poetry, Blind Fireworks.
He entered the literary circle of London, where he met Bonamy Dobree, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Cecil Day Lewis and Mulk Raj Anand. He describes his first meeting with Anand thus: 'It was outside the British Museum that I met Mulk Raj Anand, a young Indian novelist. Mulk was small and lithe and very handsome, wore shirts, ties and scarves of scarlet or coral, talked very fast and all the time, was a crusader for the Indian Left' (The Strings Are False, p. 209). By 1940, war had broken out in Europe and MacNeice decided to leave for the United States where he remained until December that year. He was not fit for war service but joined the BBC in 1941. In wartime London, MacNeice still socialized with many of his literary friends from the 1930s: Cecil Day Lewis, Mulk Raj Anand and M. J. Tambimuttu. MacNeice also published many of his poems in Tambimuttu's journal Poetry London and was included in Tambimuttu's Poetry in Wartime (1942).
Upon Indian independence in 1947, MacNeice was sent to India to cover the event for the BBC. He and his companions Francis Dillon and Wynford Vaughan Thomas travelled through much of India and reported back to England on the celebrations as well as the horrors they witnessed.
In 1961, MacNeice gave up full-time employment at the BBC to free up time for writing. In 1963 he became ill, and he died of viral pneumonia on 3 September.
Mulk Raj Anand, W. H. Auden (Oxford), Bonamy Dobree, T. S. Eliot (Criterion), Stephen Spender, M. J. Tambimuttu (Poetry London, Poetry in Wartime), Dylan Thomas (acted in MacNeice's plays).
Blind Fireworks (London: Victor Gollancz, 1929)
(with Stephen Spender) Oxford Poetry, 1929 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1929)
Roundabout Way (New York and London: Putnam, 1932)
Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1935)
(with W. H. Auden) Letters from Iceland (London: Faber & Faber, 1937)
Out of the Picture: A Play in Two Acts (London: Faber & Faber, 1937)
The Earth Compels: Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1938)
I Crossed the Minch (London: Longmans, 1938)
Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (London: Oxford University Press, 1938)
Zoo (London: Michael Joseph, 1938)
Autumn Journal: A Poem (London: Faber & Faber, 1939)
The Last Ditch (Dublin: Cuala, 1940)
Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1940)
Plant and Phantom: Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1941)
The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (London: Oxford University Press, 1941)
Christopher Columbus: A Radio Play (London: Faber & Faber, 1944)
Springboard: Poems, 1941–1944 (London: Faber & Faber, 1944)
The Dark Tower, and Other Radio Scripts (London: Faber & Faber, 1947)
Holes in the Sky: Poems, 1944–1947 (London: Faber & Faber, 1948)
Collected Poems, 1925–1948 (London: Faber & Faber, 1949)
Ten Burnt Offerings (London: Faber & Faber, 1952)
Visitations (London: Faber & Faber, 1952)
Autumn Sequel: A Rhetorical Poem in XXVI Cantos (London: Faber & Faber, 1954)
The Other Wing (London: Faber & Faber, 1954)
The Sixpence That Rolled Away (London: Faber & Faber, 1956)
Eighty-Five Poems: Selected by the Author (London: Faber & Faber, 1959)
Solstices (London: Faber & Faber, 1961)
The Burning Perch (London: Faber & Faber, 1963)
Astrology (London: Aldus Books, 1964)
The Mad Islands, and The Administrator: Two Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 1964)
The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography (London: Faber & Faber, 1965)
Varieties of Parable (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965)
(with E. R. Dodds) The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (London: Faber & Faber, 1966)
One for the Grave: A Modern Morality Play (London: Faber & Faber, 1968)
Persons from Porlock, and Other Plays for Radio, with an Introduction by W. H. Auden (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1969)
The Revenant: A Song-Cycle for Hedli Anderson (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1975)
(with Alana Heuser and Peter MacDonald) Selected Plays of Louis MacNeice (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1993)
Anand, Mulk Raj and Williams, Jane, 'Talking of Tambi: The Dilemma of the Asian Intellectual', in Jane Williams (ed.) Tambimuttu: Bridge Between Two Worlds (London: Peter Owen, 1989), pp. 191–201
Armitage, Christopher Mead, A Bibliography of the Works of Louis MacNeice (London: Kaye & Ward, 1973)
Brown, Richard Danson, Louis MacNeice and the Poetry of the 1930s (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2009)
Brown, Terence, Louis MacNeice: Sceptical Vision (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan; New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1975)
Brown, Terence and Reid, Alan, Time Was Away: The World of Louis MacNeice (Dublin: Dolmen Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1974)
Coulton, Barbara, Louis MacNeice in the BBC (London: Faber & Faber, 1980)
David, D. M., 'MacNeice, (Frederick) Louis (1970–1963)', rev. by Jon Stallworthy, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/34808]
Devine, Kathleen and Peacock, Alan J., Louis MacNeice and His Influence (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1998)
Haffenden, John, William Empson, Vol. 2: Against the Christians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005–6)
Heuser, Alan, Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987)
Innes, C. L., A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, 1700–2000, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)
Longley, Edna, Louis MacNeice: A Study (London: Faber & Faber, 1988)
McDonald, Peter, Louis MacNeice: The Poet in His Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)
MacKinnon, William Tulloch, Apollo's Blended Dream: A Study of the Poetry of Louis MacNeice (London: Oxford University Press, 1971)
Marsack, Robyn, The Cave of Making: The Poetry of Louis MacNeice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982)
Moore, Donald Bert, The Poetry of Louis MacNeice (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1972)
O'Neill, Michael, Auden, MacNeice, Spender: The Thirties Poetry (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992)
Press, John, Louis MacNeice (London: Longmans, 1965)
Smith, Elton Edward, Louis MacNeice (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970)
Stallworthy, Jon, Louis MacNeice (London: Faber & Faber, 1995)
Whitehead, John, A Commentary on the Poetry of W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender (Lewiston, NY, and Lampeter: Mellen, 1992)
Wigginton, Chris, Modernism from the Margins: The 1930s Poetry of Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007)
Correspondence and papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford
Letters to E. R. Dodds, Bodleian Library, Oxford
Letters to parents from Sherborne and Marlborough, Bodleian Library, Oxford
Literary MSS and MSS, Columbia University, New York
MSS, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge
Letters to Anthony Blunt, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge
MSS and correspondence, State University of New York
Image credit
(Frederick) Louis MacNeice by Howard Coster, nitrate negative, 1942, NPG x1623
© National Portrait Gallery, London, Creative Commons, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
