Macneice, Louis

Related Category: English Literature, 20th cent. to the Present: Biographies

(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).

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).