Selected Poems of Louis Macneice

Long thought to be merely part of the Auden generation, and often viewed as an English poet, Louis MacNeice became important to the postwar generation of Irish poets, especially those from Northern Ireland like Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon, because of his lyrically nuanced considerations of international as well as national issues. Born and raised in Northern Ireland, and educated in England where he resided for much of his adult life, MacNeice answered a need in these poets for a perspective that made the local have larger political significance. He also offered an angry critique of Ireland and Irish history that was tempered by familial love and affection. Michael Longley’s selection of poems highlights why the critique and the perspective that MacNeice provided were important to his generation as well as to those that have followed. It also shows us that Louis MacNeice’s mixed allegiance between Ireland and England, his urbanity, his postmodern pluralism, and his belief that the personal is political, make him a poet for our day.

Frederick Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907. He attended Oxford, where he majored in classics and philosophy, and was part of the generation of poets that included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis. He taught at the University of Birmingham and at Bedford College for Women, until he joined the BBC in 1941 as a staff writer and producer. Some of his best-known plays, including Christopher Columbus (1944) and The Dark Tower (1946), were originally written for radio and later published. Although he chose to live the majority of his adult life in London, MacNeice frequently returned to the landscapes of his childhood, and he took pride in his Irish heritage. In August of 1963, MacNeice, on location with a BBC team, insisted on going down into a mineshaft to check on sound effects. He caught a chill that was not diagnosed as pneumonia until he was fatally ill. He died on September 3, 1963, at age 55, just before the publication of his last book of poems, The Burning Perch.