MACNEICE, Louis

"Poetry in my opinion must be honest before anything else and I refuse to be 'objective' or clear-cut at the cost of honesty."

Louis MacNeice was an Irish poet and playwright and part of the same generation of the Auden Group as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. 

He was born in Belfast in 1907 and his early education concentrated on the Classics leading to his winning a classical scholarship to Marlborough College in 1921. Here his interest in ancient literature and civilisation deepened and widened to include Egyptian and Norse mythology as well as Greek and Latin. This love for the Classics stayed with him throughout his career as he even went on to do his own translation of The Agamemnon of Aeschylus in 1936. He was awarded a postmastership to Merton College, Oxford in 1925 where he met W.H. Auden. 

His first poetry collection, Blind Fireworks, was published in 1929 but was considered by MacNeice to be juvenilia and thus was excluded from his 1949 collection Collected Poems. He was awarded the CBE in 1958. His final book of poems was actually published a few days after his funeral. The Burning Peach’s poems, written in the last two years of his life, were described by Auden as “among his very best”.