The Irish poet Louis MacNeice (1907-1964) claimed himself to be not a theorist but a poetic empiricist. His unfinished autobiography was posthumously published as The Strings Are False.Louis MacNeice ...
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In the 1930s, Louis MacNeice showed tremendous promise both as a writer of original plays for the stage and, with The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1937), as a translator capable of giving new life to Greek...
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Louis MacNeice was widely regarded in the 1930s as a junior member of the Auden-Spender-Day Lewis group: MacNeice and Stephen Spender were contemporaries and friends at Oxford, serving as joint editor...
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In the following essay, which was originally written in 1981, Grennan analyzes the complex emotions in MacNeice's poetry about Ireland. Grennan notes that these poems contain a mixture of appre...
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In the following essay, Ellis attributes the form, content, and inspiration of MacNeice's Autumn Sequel to Dante's Inferno, James Joyce's Ulysses, and MacNeice's own Autumn...
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In the following essay, Stallworthy admits that MacNeice's romantic loves influenced his poetry, yet maintains that the two strongest loves that appear in his poems are his love for his mother ...
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In the following essay, McDonald appraises the poems collected in The Burning Perch, MacNeice's last collection. McDonald states the poems are filled with images of death, birth, the past, the ...
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In the following essay, McDonald provides an overview of MacNeice's life and career and examines the conflicting images in his poems that represent the emotional, personal, and political aspect...
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In the following essay, Kirkham argues that MacNeice's poems expertly shed light on the insecurities and confusions inherent to daily life. Kirkham further follows this theme throughout the sta...
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In the following essay, Longley addresses how MacNeice's structuring and arrangement of poetry has evolved over the course of his career, noting that MacNeice experimented with classic form and...
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In the following essay, Skelton psychoanalyzes the recurring themes of threads, wires, and trains in MacNeice's poetry. Skelton asserts that these repeating images cannot be interpreted solely ...
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In the following essay, Pikoulis surveys the poems written by MacNeice in the 1930s, observing that they contain numerous uses of alliteration, follow a rhythmical and repetitive syntax, and incorpora...
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In the first excerpt below, Whitehead describes Out of the Picture as a collection of poems with diverse themes and rhythms, and regards The Earth Compels as strongly influenced by MacNeice's w...
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In the following excerpt, Peacock compares MacNeice's poetry with that of the classical Roman poet Horace, noting the thematic similarities of agnosticism and man's evanescent existence....
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In the following essay, Hufstader provides an in-depth study of the poetic and journalistic aspects of Autumn Journal and praises MacNeice for admitting ignorance instead of posturing and feigning und...
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In the following essay, Mahony interprets MacNeice's Holes in the Sky as reflecting the poet's reaction to and conflicting emotions concerning World War II. Mahony pays particular attent...
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Critical Essay by T. Brown
MacNeice's interest in allegory and dream is most developed in his series of Clark lectures which comprise Varieties of Parable. This work is a broad survey of alleg...
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Critical Essay by William T. Mckinnon
'The Pale Panther' is one of the 'thumbnail nightmares', as MacNeice called them, in his last collection, The Burning Perch. It is no...
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Critical Essay by Samuel Hynes
MacNeice had always been the least political writer of his generation, and his play [Out of the Picture] articulates a mood of the time unaffected by political ideas. T...
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Louis MacNeice
(Frederick) Louis MacNeice
Critical Essay by Eamon Grennan
