About MacNeice

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Louis MacNeice Society

A society dedicated to the life and the works of Louis MacNeice.

About MacNeice

Frederick Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland's County Antrim, and subsequently relocated to the nearby town of Carrickfergus. In his teenage years, he gave up using his initial name, Frederick, and instead began using his middle name, Louis. MacNeice was the youngest son of Elizabeth Margaret, a schoolteacher, and Reverend John MacNeice, a clergyman.

MacNeice regularly addresses themes of loneliness, ephemerality, and the human condition in his poetry, which is filled with solipsistic insight, an ambivalence with neutrality and religious sorrow, and a Romantic sensibility that conflicts with his sporadic modernist undertones. His poetry frequently combine many subjects and ideas, weaving them together to form a complex tapestry of observations and ideas.

MacNeice enjoys using cyclical structures and passing observations to capture the subtleties and inconsistencies found in both poetry and life itself. His sophisticated poetic style is a testament to his battle with creativity and his astute awareness of his environment. His ability to grasp the essence of his surroundings and transfer them into poetic form is demonstrated by the vivid descriptions of landscapes, towns, and people that appear frequently in his poems.

Though his upbringing and considerable life experience in England position him in the category of Anglo-Irish poets, MacNeice's contemporaries Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Derek Mahon all insist that MacNeice is an Irish poet. MacNeice's poetic style is a subject of dispute due of its eclectic and varied nature. His work lacks a unified aesthetic and subject focus, making it challenging to place him inside a particular literary trend or lineage. His disjointed structure and experimental language, exhibit modernist features, but he also takes a more conventional and lyrical approach to his writing. Being a poet of the mid-twentieth century, MacNeice's work was influenced by the turbulent times he lived in, including World War II and the rise of totalitarian and fascist regimes. Despite departures from his assertion that metrical verse and Romantic traditions should always be present in poetry, his modernist elements are persistently visible in his poetic identity.

Life

Frederick Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast, Ireland ‘between the mountain and the gantries’ in 1907. The youngest son of John Frederick MacNeice, an Anglican rector, and Elizabeth ‘Lily’ MacNeice; his parents were both from Omey Island, Co. Galway, where his father had run a Church of Ireland Mission School which aimed to convert local Catholics to the Protestant faith. However, an altercation took place with the local (Catholic) parish priest, the police were called, and the MacNeice’s were rather dramatically cast off the island.

‘The west of Ireland,’ a phrase which still stirs me,’ wrote MacNeice, ‘if not like a trumpet, like a

fiddle half heard through a cattle fair… the very name Connemara seemed too rich for an ordinary place. It appeared to be a country of windswept open spaces and mountains blazing whims and seas that were never quiet, and drowned palaces beneath them, and seals and eagles and turf smoke and cottagers who were always laughing and gave you milk when you asked for glass of water. And the people’s voices were different there, soft and rich like my father’s.’ Despite this romanticism for the west of Ireland, MacNeice was attracted to his grandfather’ insistence that the family was descended from the mythical Ulster king Conchobar MacNessa.

It should be said that the MacNeice family habitually went by their second names; the poet, though known as and signing off letters as ‘Freddie’ would drop this in favour of ‘Louis’ when he started university. The poet wrote of his father that he had a voice that was ‘soft and rich’ and would turn words such as ‘heron’ and ‘orange’ into a single syllable. The reverend had a great appreciation for the inherent musicality of language, which made his sermons pleasant to listen to, and which he evidently passed on to his son; evidenced by poems such as ‘Bagpipe Music’ and ‘Sunlight on the Garden,’ which began in development under the working title ‘Song.’ On 25th November 1908, Frederick MacNeice was instituted to St. Nicholas Parish in Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim, about ten miles outside Belfast; he would later be appointed the Bishop of Down and Connor, in a promotion which would be lobbied against by the unionist leader Edward Carson, also known as the prosecution for Oscar Wilde’s trial on charges of indecency.

Frederick MacNeice was a strong supporter of Home Rule, abhorring the idea of partition, though more so than that he abhorred violence (another sentiment he would instill in his son) and though he saw it as an injustice that Ireland which was geographically ‘one’ should be politically ‘two,’ he said he would rather wait ‘any number of years than attempt to lay the foundations of Irish unity in Irish blood.’ Despite his politics, MacNeice was admired by the working class Protestants he counted as neighbours in east Belfast, and in Carrickfergus; his sermons were received positively, though his refusal to sign the Ulster Covenant, which pledged to take up arms to maintain Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom, would have been looked upon with hostility. In his capacity as Bishop of Down and Connor he was obliged to preside over Edward Carson’s funeral at St. Anne’s Cathedral in 1935. Carson’s coffin had been draped in a Union Flag, which as a final act victory, MacNeice insisted be removed before the coffin entered the Church.

Lily MacNeice had been ill for much of the family’s time in Carrickfergus, and her physical illness caused her to decline into depression; in 1913 it was deemed that she required a hysterectomy, which she believed to have been caused by Louis’ difficult birth. This appears to have weighed upon his mind where he wrote ‘the day I was born | I suppose that the same hour was full of her screams.’ Her depression worsened, she was moved to a nursing home in Dublin, where she would die of tuberculosis in December 1914. In his only published novel Roundabout Way, the main character Devlin Urquhart, a loosely disguised caricature for MacNeice himself, writes that he barely remembered his mother, and his memories of her were akin to a door opening and closing in quick succession. One suspects this was a case of art imitating life.

Safe to say that MacNeice was a sensitive child, who was frightened by not only the dark but the

shadows thrown onto the wall by the flickering oil lamps; even his mother’s making rabbits of her hand shadows unsettled him. This could not have been helped by his mother dying when he was still an infant, and the family life disrupted further by his father’s remarriage to Georgina Beatrice ‘Bea’ Greer. Louis and Elizabeth would be sent to boarding school in England, breaking with a family tradition of being educated in Ireland, at least partly on Bea’s insistence, in her hope that they would lose their Irish accents. There had been much speculation on the extent to which this was successful, with Derek Mahon writing that he could still here faint Irish tones in the recordings of MacNeice’s poetry readings, but that he was not sure the extent to which this was wishful thinking on his part.

MacNeice would write to Elizabeth that they seemed to remember different things of their childhood, with him thinking in depressive terms. Depression would be a lifelong factor for MacNeice, and perhaps an influence on his relationship with alcohol. He was a known ‘double-fist drinker’ meaning a pint of Guinness in one hand and a shot one of whiskey in the other.

‘Louis was an alien in every social class,’ wrote David Fitzpatrick, and it is true that there seems to have been a limit to the poet’s sociability; with some commenting on not knowing where they say with him after having been an hour in his company, and his second wife Hedli Anderson feeling the need to address his ‘aloofness’ in her eulogy ‘The Story of the House that Louis Built.’ The late writer Wilfred D’eath wrote of the six months in which he shared an office with MacNeice, whom he described as ‘cold as a fish.’ ‘I don’t think we ever exchanged a friendly word. He was too busy selling off his manuscripts to various American universities. Possibly he resented my overhearing his conversations. He died soon afterwards.’ ‘Louis would get up in the morning, sniff the air and try to decide whether it was a Guinness day or a gin-and-tonic day,’ wrote D’eath.

MacNeice himself, when in want of a nom de plume for Roundabout Way, believing that academics – for he was at the time lecturing in Birmingham, serving as ‘impresario to the Ancient Greeks’ – were blacklisted by publishers, settled on Louis Malone. This is not only a particularly Irish reference, namely to Molly Malone of ‘cockles and mussels’ fame, but also works as a reference to Belfast’s Malone Road, perhaps as a self-deprecation on middle class Protestantism; but also, is, quite simply, ‘Louis Malone.’

One ought to bear in mind that a person is perhaps not at their best in the office workplace, and not only does MacNeice’s poetry portray a conscientious and tender-hearted character, but contradictory anecdotes also point that way as well. Heather Clark wrote in Red Comet, a biography of Sylvia Plath (herself a fan of MacNeice), that after Plath killed herself in 1963 her friend Douglas Cleverdon arrived in a state of distress at The George, a pub on Great Portland street in London where MacNeice happened to be drinking. Someone made a disparaging and distasteful comment along the lines of ‘what can you expect from these women poets?’ at which MacNeice rounded on him and told him to shut up, saying ‘can’t you see this man’s upset, and rightly so.’

At the back of St. Anne’s Cathedral, where his father once preached, the first stanzas of MacNeice’s poem ‘Meeting Point’ stand as an art installation; the long-exiled poet repatriated to the heart of Belfast. MacNeice’s work is a careful dialectic study of the Irish politics of his time, and of the personalities involved; it shows a close attention to, study of, and experimentation with poetic form; and it also lays bare the machinations of a tormented mind. It is for these reasons that Louis MacNeice is rightly counted as one of the foremost, seminal poets of the twentieth century.

Death

MacNeice died unexpectedly of pneumonia in 1963 following a visit to a damp cave in Yorkshire where he had been undertaking research for one of his own BBC radio plays, Persons From Porlock. In MacNeice's opinion, he had contracted a 'mysterious illness' that was not to be bothered about, which is a comfort since, while he may have suffered, he did not panic or believe he was dying. His heart ultimately stopped, although there is no record of prolonged suffering. His death was caused by his failure to change out of his wet clothes when he returned at his Hertfordshire home after getting caught in a storm on the moors. This led to an arduous and damp journey of around 200 kilometers. Consequently, his bronchitis turned into viral pneumonia, and he was sent to a hospital in London on the 27th of August. He passed away there on the 3rd of September at the age of 55. The unexpected nature of his demise, stemming from a seemingly innocuous act of dedication to his craft, creates a poignant sense of irony that could be considered tragicomic; he died doing what he loved, although irresponsibly.

Hank, the protagonist of Persons From Porlock, has an eerily similar fate to MacNeice - they shared a remarkable connection characterised by an extraordinary level of convergence. MacNeice delved into underground spaces during the preparation of his play for broadcast, accompanied by a sound engineer from the BBC. His fascination with subterranean environments had always been present in his writings, particularly in relation to caves, tunnels, and burial chambers. In Hank's case, this affinity for potholes intersected with his artistic aspirations and his childhood experience of maternal abandonment. MacNeice himself had faced a similar trauma, with his mother being institutionalised and passing away a year later. His expedition of a salt mine in Carrickfergus, as told in The Strings Are False, revealed a comparable concern with underground regions, which resulted in an incomplete but now published memoir following his death. MacNeice's peers and contemporary researchers agreed that despite his untimely and sudden death, he nonetheless produced a significant body of work while he was alive. Yet, it is safe to assume that MacNeice could have avoided this dreadful calamity if he had exercised more caution, and we would also have a larger body of work to examine and enjoy.

In County Down's Carrowdore churchyard, MacNeice's ashes were interred alongside those of his mother and grandfather. When W. H. Auden read at MacNeice's memorial ceremony, he referred to the poems from his last two years as 'among his very best'. The Burning Perch, was published posthumously a few days after his funeral. Auden's memorial presentation was delivered at All Souls, Langham Place in London on the 17th of October 1963 and included an honour speech and the funeral order of ceremony for MacNeice. There are only 250 copies of this privately manufactured edition for Faber & Faber.

American poet, John Berryman, remarked that MacNeice was 'one of my best friends', and wrote an elegy in Dream Song 267. After reviewing their correspondence, MacNeice's friend and literary executor, E. R. Dodds, described him as 'a rich flow of fun and fantasy, mercurial gaiety, warm vitality, and love of life.'¹

Legacy

Glenn Patterson remarked that 'when it comes to Northern Ireland and Poets We Could Not Have Done Without it is difficult to imagine how anyone could rival MacNeice for the title. And if you doubt me, think of three of the other contenders - Heaney, Longley, Mahon - gathered as young men at his grave in Carrowdore; think of two of the others - Carson and Muldoon - with their nods to 'Snow'. Actually just think of 'Snow.'²

The late Seamus Heaney observed that since MacNeice's death in 1963 he 'has been an abiding presence, larger and more luminous as the years go by, his contribution increasingly recognised and his importance ever more verified by the critical and creative work of poetic heirs who have flourished during the last half century 'between the mountains and the gantries'. We have reached a point where MacNeice's time is not 'away and somewhere else', but here and now.'³

The two great Irish poets Derek Mahon and Michael Longley planned to meet MacNeice, but Longley found himself 'far too shy and uncertain.'⁴ Derek shared a similar embarrassment in MacNeice's presence: 'I was virtually ignored but didn't mind, aware that, while to me he was the great poet, to him I was nobody in particular [...] He didn't want to be bothered (why should he?) and he was tired of words, of which he had written a great many. Tired too, perhaps, of life itself.'⁵ Despite a frustrating and sorrowful experience, Mahon maintained that for him, MacNeice's 'best work now rises above that of his contemporaries.'⁶ Mahon and Longley have gone on to write about MacNeice's poetry while also writing their own, which each hold perpetual MacNeicean overtones.

Paul Muldoon has stated explicitly that MacNeice is one of his primary influences, in his poem 'History' he goes on to talk about MacNeice's 'Snow': 'Where and when exactly did we first have sex? / [...] When you and I climbed through the bay window / [...] And into the room where MacNeice wrote ‘Snow’, / Or the room where they say he wrote ‘Snow?' Muldoon shares an intimate moment with the late MacNeice, which creates a wholesome hilarity while simultaneously hinting at the mystique underlying MacNeice's creative production. MacNeice's legacy is not solely about specific works, but also about the mystery surrounding how they were made. Muldoon's engagement with MacNeicean aesthetics and methods has resulted in a distinct literary voice that acknowledges his predecessor while also pushing the frontiers of modern poetry. Muldoon is inspired by MacNeice to experiment with form, language, and topics, resulting in a complex and engaging body of work. Muldoon's poetry has a distinct and idiosyncratic style, and MacNeice's influence has had a significant impact on his techniques.

Andie Kristina, a contemporary MacNeicean scholar, stated that 'everyone should read MacNeice's poetry; it penetrates every nook of the private psyche, and his voice is ever persistent in its similarity to one's own experiences, it has the ability to offering unwavering comfort and clarity amidst life's uncertainties. He was not as popular as he should have been, and he did not make it directly into the canon, but he was also not utterly ignored. I am always saddened by his premature demise, despite never having had an opportunity to know him. But I have read his poetry, and it was filled with deep, personal examinations, with his heart on his sleeve, this is how we know MacNeice. His legacy lives on in our collections of his work and personal interactions, which individuals have written about. He will live on via poets who are inspired by him, and he will always be remembered. For me, MacNeice is more than a poet; he depicts sensations that I could not articulate before; he still remains an insightful and altruistic translator, something of a genius.'⁸

Let us conclude with Gerald Dawe's timeless words: 'I hope the rest of the world hears about Louis MacNeice, for he deserves the widest possible audience, now, more than ever.'⁹

Irish

Derek Mahon

Paul Muldoon

Derek Mahon

Norman Derek Mahon (23rd November 1941 - 1st October 2020)

James Joyce

Paul Muldoon

Derek Mahon

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2nd February 1882- 13th January 1941)

Paul Muldoon

Michael Longley

Paul Muldoon (25th June 1951 -)

Michael Longley

Michael Longley (27th July 1939 -)

Seamus Heaney

Michael Longley

Samuel Beckett

Seamus Justin Heaney (13th April 1939 - 30th August 2013)

Samuel Beckett

Michael Longley

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett (13th April 1906 - 22nd December 1989

W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats (13th June 1865 - 28th January 1939)

Works

Poetry Collections

Blind Fireworks (1929, MacNeice's first book of poetry)
Roundabout Way (1932)
Poems (1935)
I Crossed The Minch (1937)
Letters from Iceland (1937, composed with W. H. Auden, this contains poetry and prose)
The Earth Compels (1938)
Autumn Journal (1939, often deemed as both MacNeice's masterpiece and his most popular work)
The Last Ditch (1940)
Selected Poems (1940)
Plant and Phantom (1941)
Springboard (1944)
Holes in the Sky (1948)
Collected Poems, 1925–1948 (1949)
Ten Burnt Offerings (1952)
Autumn Sequel (1954)
Visitations (1957)
Solstices (1961)
The Burning Perch (1963, all collections including this piece and after were published posthumously)
Star-Gazer (1963)
Selected Poems (1964, edited by W. H. Auden)
Collected Poems (1966, edited by E. R. Dodds)
Selected Poems (1988, edited by Michael Longley; redesigned and republished by Wake Forest University Press, 2009)
Collected Poems (2007, edited by Peter McDonald)

Plays

The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1936, translated by MacNeice)
Out of the Picture (1937)
Christopher Columbus (1944, radio) & performed, Brighton Dome (2002)
He Had a Date (1944, radio, not published separately)
The Dark Tower and other radio scripts (1947)
Goethe's Faust (1949, published 1951, a translation)
The Mad Islands [1962] and The Administrator [1961] (1964, radio)
Persons From Porlock [1963] and other plays for radio (1969)
One for the Grave: a modern morality play [1958] (1968)
Selected Plays of Louis MacNeice, edited by Alan Heuser and Peter McDonald (1993)

Fictional Books

Roundabout Way (1932, written under the pseudonym 'Louis Malone')
The Sixpence That Rolled Away (1956, a children's book)

Non-Fictional Books

I Crossed the Minch (1938, travel, prose and verse)
Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (1938, criticism of poetry through MacNeice's experience as a student and poet)
Zoo (1938)
The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1941, a subject of groundbreaking critical study in 1939, not long after Yeats passed away)
The Strings Are False (1941, published 1965, autobiography)
Meet the US Army (1943)
Astrology (1964)
Varieties of Parable (1965, criticism)
Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, edited by Alan Heuser (1990)

It must be remembered that due to his premature and untimely death, MacNeice also authored a number of plays that were never performed as well as other scripts for the BBC that were never published.

MacNeice Pictures

(Frederick) Louis MacNeice (1)

Photo taken by Howard Coster
nitrate negative, 1942
NPG x1623

(Frederick) Louis MacNeice (2)

(Frederick) Louis MacNeice (1)

Photo taken by Howard Coster
bromide print, 1942
NPG x22811

Howard Coster (1885-1959) was a British portrait photographer associated with over 9,000 portraits.

(Frederick) Louis MacNeice (3)

(Frederick) Louis MacNeice (1)

(Frederick) Louis MacNeice (3)

Photo taken by Howard Coster
nitrate negative, 1942
NPG x1624

MacNeice's Mistress Paints

(Frederick) Louis MacNeice (3)

Painting by Nancy Culliford Spender (née Sharp)
oil on canvas, circa 1936
NPG 6628

30 in. x 25 in. (763 mm x 634 mm)
Accepted in lieu of tax by H.M. Government and allocated to the Gallery, 2003

Nancy Spender (1909–2001) had an affair with Louis MacNeice in the late 1930s, illustrating two of his works and partially influenced Autumn Journal. At this point, she met Michael Spender, the poet Stephen Spender's brother, and fell in love.

'The Faber Poets'

MacNeice's Mistress Paints

'The Faber Poets'

The Faber Poets ((Frederick) Louis MacNeice; Ted Hughes; T.S. Eliot; W.H. Auden; Stephen Spender)

Photo taken by Mark Gerson

modern bromide print, 23rd June 1960

NPG x88256

Mark Gerson was born in 1921, portrait photographer of major twentieth-century literary figures from 1948 to the present day.

MacNeice in Sepia

MacNeice's Mistress Paints

'The Faber Poets'

Photo by Rollie McKenna
bromide print, 1954
NPG P1676

'Rollie' McKenna (1918-2003) was an American photographer. McKenna photographed several writers, including Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas.

References

¹ Quoted in The Irish Examiner <https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/arid-20127782.html>

² Glenn Patterson quoted in Peter Johnston, Castles on the Air: The life and work of poet and broadcaster Louis MacNeice, (Northern Ireland: BBC Writers, 2008), p. 65

³ Seamus Heaney quoted in Johnston, Castles on the Air, p. 61

⁴ Michael Longley quoted in Johnston, Castles on the Air, p. 55

⁵ Derek Mahon quoted in Johnston, Castles on the Air, p. 48-49

⁶ Derek Mahon quoted in Johnston, Castles on the Air, p. 49

⁷ Paul Muldoon quoted in Edna Longley, ‘When did You Last Your Father?’, in The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1994) p. 168

⁸ Andie Kristina quoted in a private correspondence in response to 'why should we read MacNeice?'

⁹ Gerald Dawe quoted in Johnston, Castles on the Air, p. 51

Louis MacNeice Society

A society dedicated to the life and the works of Louis MacNeice.

About MacNeice

Life

Death

Legacy

Influence

Contemporaries

Ezra Pound

D. H. Lawrence

Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas

D. H. Lawrence

Dylan Thomas

D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence

John Berryman

John Berryman

D. H. Lawrence

Philip Larkin

John Berryman

Philip Larkin

Sylvia Plath

John Berryman

Philip Larkin

T. S. Eliot

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Imagists

Amy Lowell

Richard Aldington

Amy Lowell

H. D.

Richard Aldington

Amy Lowell

Richard Aldington

Richard Aldington

Richard Aldington

Irish

Derek Mahon

Paul Muldoon

Derek Mahon

James Joyce

Paul Muldoon

Derek Mahon

Paul Muldoon

Paul Muldoon

Michael Longley

Michael Longley

Michael Longley

Michael Longley

Seamus Heaney

Michael Longley

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Michael Longley

Samuel Beckett

W. B. Yeats

W. B. Yeats

W. B. Yeats

'MacSpaunday'

Cecil Day-Lewis

Cecil Day-Lewis

Cecil Day-Lewis

Stephen Spender

Cecil Day-Lewis

Cecil Day-Lewis

W. H. Auden

Cecil Day-Lewis

W. H. Auden

Works

MacNeice Pictures

(Frederick) Louis MacNeice (1)

(Frederick) Louis MacNeice (1)

(Frederick) Louis MacNeice (1)

(Frederick) Louis MacNeice (2)