Louis MacNeice

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Louis MacNeice was born Frederick Louis MacNeice on September 12, 1907, in Belfast, the son of a well-respected Church of Ireland rector. Because his early childhood experiences inform the imagery and ideas of almost all his work, the details of MacNeice’s early life are important. His father, John Frederick MacNeice, and his mother, Elizabeth Margaret, were both natives of Connemara in the west of Ireland, a bastion of wild tales and imagination. Both parents communicated to their children their strong attachment to the Ireland of their youth as opposed to the stern, dour, Puritanical atmosphere of Ulster. MacNeice’s father was extraordinary among Protestant Irishmen in his outspoken support for Home Rule and a united Irish republic. Thus the young poet started life with a feeling of displacement and a nostalgia for a culture and landscape he had never seen. Life in the rectory was, of course, pervaded by religion and a sense of duty and social responsibility. MacNeice had a sister, Elizabeth, five years his elder, and a brother, William, in between, who had Down syndrome and therefore did not figure heavily in the other children’s play. The children were fairly isolated and developed many imaginative games. Louis showed a tendency toward gothic preoccupations in his fear of partially hidden statues in the church and in the graveyard that adjoined his garden. Of special significance is his mother’s removal to a nursing home and subsequent death when Louis was seven. She had provided comfort and gaiety in the otherwise secluded and stern life of the Rectory. Louis, the youngest, had been particularly close to her, and his poetry reflects the rupture in his world occasioned by her loss. Without their mother and intimidated by the misery of their father, the MacNeice children became particularly subject to the influences of servants. On one hand, the cook, Annie, was a warm Catholic peasant who spoke of fairies and leprechauns. On the other hand, Miss MacCready, who was hired to take care of the children when their mother became ill, was the antithesis of both Mrs. MacNeice and Annie, a puritanical Calvinist, extremely dour and severe, lecturing constantly about hell and damnation.

In 1917, MacNeice’s father remarried. Though she was very kind and devoted, the new Mrs. MacNeice had a Victorian, puritanical outlook on life that led to further restrictions on the children’s behavior. Soon after the marriage, MacNeice was sent to Marlborough College, an English public school, further confusing his cultural identity. From this point on, England became his adopted home, but the English always regarded him as Irish. The Irish, of course, considered him an Anglo-Irishman, while he himself always felt his roots to be in the west of Ireland. Both at Marlborough and later at Merton College, Oxford, MacNeice was in his milieu. At Marlborough he was a friend of Anthony Blunt and John Betjeman, among others. He flourished in the atmosphere of aestheticism and learning. At Oxford he encountered Stephen Spender and the other poets with whom he came to be associated in the 1930’s. MacNeice studied the classics and philosophy at Oxford, and these interests are second only to the autobiographical in their influence on his poetry. He graduated from Oxford with a double first in Honour Moderations and “Greats.”

Having rebelled against his upbringing by drinking heavily and rejecting his faith at Oxford, MacNeice in a sense completed the break by marrying a Jewish girl, Mariette Ezra. Together they moved to Birmingham, where he was appointed lecturer in classics at the University. In Birmingham, MacNeice encountered the working class and taught their aspiring children at the University....

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He had always been protected from the lower classes of Belfast and in English schools had lived among the upper classes. The new contact with working people led to a healthy respect for the ordinary man and a broadening of MacNeice’s social awareness. At the same time, he was becoming recognized as a member of the “poets of the thirties,” with Auden, Isherwood, Spender, and Cecil Day Lewis, whose sense of social responsibility led them to espouse Marxism. MacNeice never became a communist, but he did write about social issues and questioned the comfortable assumptions of traditional English liberalism. While at Birmingham, MacNeice became friendly with E. R. Dodds, who was later to become his literary executor. In 1934, he and his wife had a son, Dan, and in 1936, his wife abruptly left her son and husband to live with an American graduate student at Oxford, Charles Katzman. This abandonment, parallel to the death of his mother, haunted MacNeice for many years and is reflected in his poetry. In the later 1930’s, MacNeice traveled twice to Spain, reporting on the Spanish Civil War, and twice to Iceland, the second time with Auden. In 1936, he became lecturer in Greek at Bedford College for women at the University of London. In 1939 and 1940, he lectured at colleges in the United States, returning to what he felt to be his civic responsibility to England following the outbreak of World War II.

From 1941, MacNeice worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation as a scriptwriter and producer, except for the year and a half in 1950-1951 that he served as director of the British Institute in Athens, Greece. In 1942, he married a singer, Hedli Anderson; they had a daughter, Corinna, the following year. In the 1940’s and 1950’s, MacNeice traveled extensively, to India, Greece, Wales, the United States, Africa, Asia, France, and Ireland. His premature death in 1963 was the sort of paradoxical experience he might have used in a poem on the irony of life. He was going far beyond the call of duty for the BBC by descending a chilly manhole to check the sound transmission for a feature he was producing. He suffered from exposure, contracted pneumonia, and died. Such a death appears to represent the antithesis of the poetic, yet for MacNeice, poetry spoke about the ordinary as well as the metaphysical and it was intended to speak to the ordinary man. His death resulted from the performance of his ordinary human responsibility, his job.

Biography

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Louis MacNeice (muhk-NEES) was born in Belfast, Ireland (now in Northern Ireland), on September 12, 1907. His father was a pastor in the Church of Ireland; his mother had been born in Connemara in the west country. When he was still a very young child, his father received a parish in Carrickfergus, at that time a small town in the countryside outside of Belfast. He had an older sister and a younger brother who was afflicted with Down syndrome. In 1914, his mother died of tuberculosis after a lengthy illness, and the young Louis was devastated. This experience seems to have made him perpetually reserved and shy and rendered him vulnerable to the fear of loss.

MacNeice’s father, despite his church affiliation, supported home rule, a position which made his life among his fellow Protestants rather uncomfortable and went a long way toward isolating the MacNeice family from their neighbors. His political sympathies did not make him friends in Catholic Ireland, either. In order to remove Louis from the tensions of Irish life, his father sent him to school in England, first to Sherborne, and then to Marlborough College. All his life, MacNeice was troubled by his mixed Irish and British cultural inheritance.

Despite his father’s calling, MacNeice’s faith seems not to have been strong, and his education at the English schools seems to have confirmed in him a lifelong skepticism that scarcely ever showed signs of thawing. At Marlborough, he knew Anthony Blunt and the later poet laureate, John Betjeman. While there, his interests in literature were ignited, and with his schoolmates he plunged eagerly into the works of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Butler Yeats. He was also introduced to Marxism, but although he found many of its arguments compelling, he was always skeptical about it.

MacNeice went on to Merton College, Oxford in 1925, and although his father was a Christian, who later was made bishop of Down, he lost his faith completely there. Just before graduation he married Giovanna Marie Therese Babette Ezra. He graduated with firsts (honors) in “greats” (classics and philosophy) and “mods” (history and literature).

After graduation, he and his new wife moved to Birmingham, where he lectured in the classics. While there he became more and more interested in the life of the common man and shook off, as he put it, the values of an exaggerated sense of beauty. As a result, in the thirties he resolved to write a poetry that avoided the esoteric interests of Eliot and Pound and instead concentrated on reaching the ordinary educated man.

His son Daniel was born in May, 1934. He divorced his wife on November 2, 1936, after which he lived a bachelor father’s life for some years. He was then appointed lecturer in Greek at Bedford College of the University of London, where his 1936 translation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnn (458 b.c.e.) was performed. In 1937, he traveled to Iceland with W. H. Auden, a trip which later produced the book of poems Letters from Iceland (1937) written jointly with Auden. During the publication process, he met and became friends with the poets C. Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, and Dylan Thomas. His next publishing venture was the long poem Autumn Journal (1939), a chronicle of the poet’s feelings and thoughts on many public subjects, including the continuing Spanish Civil War and life in general in England in 1938.

In 1939, MacNeice traveled to the United States, where he taught at Pennsylvania State University and at Cornell University. In 1941, he was hired by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as a scriptwriter, a job he kept through the war and on into 1954. He developed his skill at writing radio drama. His father resigned his bishopric and died shortly after in 1942; MacNeice then met and married singer Hedli Anderson, who remained with him until his death. In 1943, the marriage produced a daughter. Between this time and his death in 1963, MacNeice continued to publish books of poems, radio plays, and translations, most notably his 1951 translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (pb. 1808, 1833, pr. 1829, 1854) for radio production. His last significant public act was the delivery of the Clark Lectures, in Cambridge in the spring of 1963. The lectures were printed posthumously as Varieties of Parable (1965). He died on September 3, 1963, while supervising the production of his last radio play, Persons from Porlock (pb. 1969). He was nine days short of his fifty-sixth birthday.

Biography

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Louis MacNeice was born one generation after Eliot and Pound, and his early poetry reacts against these figures by being less concerned with aesthetics and more with social problems. He wrote both long and short poems with considerable technical skill. After World War II, he concentrated on radio plays, but he also wrote some of the most finely etched poetry of the twentieth century. He never ceased believing that poetry was a gift for the community and that the job of the poet was to be the community’s conscience.