Louis MacNeice

Frederick Louis MacNeice (September 12, 1907 – September 3, 1963) was a British and Irish poet and playwright. He was part of the generation of "thirties poets" which included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis. His body of work was widely appreciated by the public during his lifetime, due in part to his relaxed but socially and emotionally aware style. Never as overtly (or simplistically) political as some of his contemporaries, his work shows a humane opposition to totalitarianism as well as an acute awareness of his Irish roots.

Works

Poetry

• Blind Fireworks (1929, mainly considered by MacNeice to be juvenilia and excluded from the 1949 Collected Poems)
• Poems (1935)
• Letters from Iceland (1937, with W H Auden, poetry and prose)
• The Earth Compels (1938)
• Autumn Journal (1939)
• The Last Ditch (1940)
• Plant and Phantom (1941)
• Springboard (1944)
• Holes in the Sky (1948)
• Collected Poems, 1925-1948 (1949)
• Ten Burnt Offerings (1952)
• Autumn Sequel (1954)
• Visitations (1957)
• Solstices (1961)
• The Burning Perch (1963)
• Selected Poems (1964, edited by W. H. Auden)
• Collected Poems (1966, edited by E. R. Dodds)
• Selected Poems (1988, edited by Michael Longley)

Plays

• The Agamemnon (1936, translation of Aeschylus)
• Out of the Picture (1937)
• Christopher Columbus (1944, radio)
• He Had a Date (1944, radio)
• The Dark Tower (1946, radio)
• Faust (1949, translation of Goethe)
• The Administrator (1961, radio)
• The Mad Islands (1962, radio)
• Persons from Porlock (1963, radio)

MacNeice also wrote several plays which were never produced, and many for the BBC which were never published.

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Fiction

• Roundabout Way (1932, as "Louis Malone")
• The Sixpence That Rolled Away (1956, for children)

Non-fiction

• I Crossed the Minch (1938, travel)
• Modern Poetry (1938, criticism)
• Zoo (1938)
• The Strings Are False (1941, published 1965, autobiography)
• Astrology (1964)
• Varieties of Parable (1965, criticism)