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 understanding of the tumultuous events that unfold around him.

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 aspects of his life.

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.

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 apprehension, love, nostalgia, distrust, and appreciation for Ireland's natural beauty.

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 incorporate themes of life, Christianity, and humanity's purpose.

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.

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 wife Mary, who abandoned him and his son. In the second excerpt, he explores MacNeice's pre-war poems in The Last Ditch and Plant and Phantom—poems that were largely written in America—and the poems he wrote during World War II that are collected in Springboard and The Revenant.

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.

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 Journal.

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 attention to the mood and theme of “The Streets of Laredo” and gauges public reception of MacNeice's rendition and other versions of this ballad.

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 future, and social concerns.

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 focused on the change and unrest in life.

'The Pale Panther' is one of the 'thumbnail nightmares', as MacNeice called them, in his last collection, The Burning Perch. It is not only one of the most terrible of the nightmares, but also one in which the mood of bleak despair is not balanced by any of his old sardonic optimism (though there is bitter wit), or any of the stoical determination of, say, his last-published poem, 'Thalassa', with its courageous message:      ...

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 by using Freudian subconscious representation theories; interpretation must be balanced with Jacques Lacan's idea of purposeful, selective symbolism.

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. The main plot-line concerns an indigent painter named Portright, whose only completed picture, 'Venus Rising', is seized by bailiffs for debts and auctioned off to a film star. Portright represents the artist and the individualist, and his painting, and Moll, the model for it, stand for art, love, and life. The film star and her ...

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 allegorical writing in English. A sensitive book, perhaps its most interesting aspect is its treatment of modern allegory, since this throws light on some of the poet's own experiments in the form…. MacNeice sees allegory as the exploration of an image, the creation of a 'special world' with a relationship of meanin...