SOURCE: Stallworthy, Jon. “Louis and the Women.” In Louis MacNeice and His Influence, edited by Kathleen Devine and Alan J. Peacock, pp. 68-84. Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe, 1998.

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 and his love of Ireland.

Louis MacNeice loved women, and women loved MacNeice. We need no ghost from the grave to tell us that, but I want to suggest that we do need a ghost to lead us back into the heart of his darkness, the mystery at the heart of his life and work.

More than 20 years after his death, his widow distilled his life into a remarkable prose poem she called ‘The House that Louis Built’:

It was a handsome house with thick walls. The windows on...