SOURCE: McDonald, Peter. “Louis MacNeice: The Burning Perch.” In A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, edited by Neil Roberts, pp. 491-99. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.

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.

The Burning Perch was published in 1963, a matter of weeks after Louis MacNeice's death at the age of fifty-five. It was an early death, and at the time of writing this volume MacNeice can have had little notion that it would be his last; indeed, the poems were composed during a period when the writer was making a new start in his working and private lives, having moved away from London and on to a part-time contract with the BBC (where his long and prolific career as a radio writer and...