MacNeice, Louis (redirected from Louis MacNeice)

MacNeice, Louis (məknēs`), 1907–63, Irish poet. Educated in England, he became a classical scholar and teacher and later was a producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. In the 1930s MacNeice allied himself with a group of poets of social protest led by W. H. Auden. His later poetry, expressing the futility of modern life, retains the sparkling wit, ironical flatness of statement, and colloquial tone of his earlier verse. His volumes of poetry include Poems, 1925–1940 (1940), Springboard (1945), Holes in the Sky (1948), Ten Burnt Offerings (1952), and Solstices (1961). He also rendered poetic translations of Aeschylus' Agamemnon (1936) and Goethe's Faust (1951).

Bibliography

See his Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography (1966); Collected Poems, ed. by E. R. Dodds (1967); studies by W. T. McKinnon (1971) and D. B. Moore (1972).

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MacNeice, Louis

MacNeice

(credit: Camera Press)

(born Sept. 12, 1907, Belfast, Ire.—died Sept. 3, 1963, London, Eng.) British poet and playwright. He published his first book of poetry, Blind Fireworks (1929), while studying at Oxford. In the 1930s he became known as one of a group of socially committed young poets that included W.H. Auden, C. Day-Lewis, and Stephen Spender. His volumes include Autumn Journal (1939) and The Burning Perch (1963). He wrote and produced radio verse plays for the BBC, notably The Dark Tower (1947), with music by Benjamin Britten. Among his prose works are Letters from Iceland (1937; with Auden) and The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1941).