SOURCE: Kirkham, Michael. “Louis MacNeice's Poetry of Ambivalence.” University of Toronto Quarterly 56, no. 4 (summer 1987): 540-56.

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 stages of MacNeice's life and career.

‘MacSpaunday,’ a satirical acronym formed from the names MacNeice, Spender, Auden, and Day Lewis, was Roy Campbell's label for the group of poets who dominated the English literary scene in the 1930s and whose work, in the foreshortening perspective of literary history, has been taken to be not only the most characteristic but also the most interesting poetry of the period. The high esteem enjoyed by Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis was an accident of literary fashion; of the four only W. H. Auden and his friend Louis MacNeice poetically survived the thirties to produce a body of...