MacNeice, << mak NEES, >> Louis (1907-1963), was an Irish-born British poet and playwright. He is best known for his association with a group of young left-wing English poets during the 1930’s. The group included W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Stephen Spender. However, MacNeice’s poetry was more informal and less intensely political than the verse of others in the group. MacNeice completed his first book of verse, Blind Fireworks, in 1929. The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice was published in 1966, after his death.
MacNeice’s nonfiction includes the travel book Letters from Iceland (with W. H. Auden, 1937) and the literary study The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1941). MacNeice also translated the ancient Greek tragedy The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1936) and the epic drama Faust by the German author Wolfgang von Goethe (1951). An unfinished autobiography, The Strings Are False, was published in 1965, after his death.
Frederick Louis MacNeice was born on Sept. 12, 1907, in Belfast in what is now Northern Ireland, which at that time was united with Ireland and part of the United Kingdom. He studied at Oxford University from 1926 to 1930. MacNeice taught classics at the University of Birmingham from 1930 to 1936 and taught Greek at the University of London from 1936 to 1940. He worked as a producer and feature writer for the British Broadcasting Company for nearly all of the period from 1940 to 1963. During that time, he wrote many radio plays, the best known being the fantasy The Dark Tower (1947). MacNeice also wrote under the name Louis Malone. MacNeice died on Sept. 3, 1963.
