The life and work of poet, novelist, playwright, and radio producer Louis MacNeice are marked by deep ambivalence. The Belfast-born MacNeice saw his mother for the last time at age six as she, suffering severe depression, went to live in a Dublin nursing home. She died the following year. He was left with his father, an Anglican clergyman and later bishop within the Church of Ireland, until the age of ten, when his father remarried and sent him away to boarding school. In those early years at his father’s house, MacNeice disappeared into his father’s books and developed a passion for learning and writing verse.
At school in England, MacNeice distinguished himself as a student of classics and won a scholarship to Oxford. There he befriended W. H. Auden, who would later become a close lifelong friend, inspiring him to make a serious effort in poetry and including him in the “Auden Group” along with Stephen Spencer and Cecil Day-Lewis. As an undergraduate, MacNeice published variously at Oxford and released a first volume of poetry, Blind Fireworks. He dedicated the book to Mary Ezra, the Jewish stepdaughter of an Oxford don, whom he married in 1930. MacNeice began lecturing in classics at the University of Birmingham upon graduating with a first-class degree. Although published in anthologies as part of Auden’s radical coterie, MacNeice never fully embraced Marxism, retaining a suspicion of devoted political partisanship. During this period, he sent poems to T. S. Eliot and developed his interest in Irish poetry, especially that of Yeats.
In 1935, the collection Poems established MacNeice as one of the bright new poets of the 1930s. But 1935 also marked some of the darkest days in his life. His wife abandoned him and their one-year-old son to run away with an American graduate student. From the ashes of that painful period, MacNeice’s most daring work flowered: the travel book Letters from Iceland (a collaboration with Auden), the nonfiction book Modern Poetry, and his poetry masterwork Autumn Journal.
After an interlude of lecturing at Cornell in the United States, MacNeice made his way to the BBC. He began writing plays for radio, which brought his writing to the broader British public. He befriended Dylan Thomas after the latter performed in some of his radio plays, adding him to an expansive circle of writerly peers that also included John Berryman and Cecil Woodham-Smith. In 1942, Auden married once again, to Hedli Anderson, with whom he would have a daughter, Brigid. Although he continued to write poetry, the critical acclaim he’d received early on was lacking; however, he was awarded a CBE in 1958. In 1963, on a trip to Yorkshire to capture sound effects from caves for a radio play, he contracted pneumonia and died soon after. Since his death, he has continued to be a major influence on Northern Irish and Irish poets.
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More Louis MacNeice
TEXT: Read poems by MacNeice at the Poetry Foundation
AUDIO: Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss MacNeice for the LRB podcast Modern-ish Poets
VIDEO: Watch the 60th anniversary celebration of MacNeice's "Autumn Journal" from Imprint