Louis MacNeice

Incandio publishes no likeness of Louis MacNeice: no photograph exists that is out of copyright or offered under a licence this product may use, and every candidate found was refused rather than stretched. In place of a face the app shows a deliberate cipher — a monogram set on a ruled manuscript page — because a missing photograph must never quietly demote the person. The life below is complete; only the picture is missing.

Who Kept The World Incorrigibly Plural · Poet · 1907–1963

The poet who paid for his poetry with twenty years of radio, and gave a poem to somebody who has not yet been born.

Who was MacNeice?

Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907, the son of a Church of Ireland rector who later became a bishop, and grew up in the rectory at Carrickfergus. His mother was taken to a nursing home when he was five and died when he was seven, and the loss runs underneath the poems without ever quite surfacing in them. He read classics at Oxford, taught Greek at Birmingham and then at Bedford College, and in 1941 joined the BBC's Features department, where he wrote and produced radio programmes for twenty years — work his literary friends considered beneath him and he did not. He is filed with Auden, Spender and Day-Lewis as a poet of the nineteen-thirties, and he was the one who would never sign anything: where the others reached for a system, he reached for a tram, a tangerine, the smell of a street. Autumn Journal, written through the months of the Munich crisis in 1938, is his long poem and his best argument for that habit. Prayer Before Birth was written in 1944 and printed in Springboard: a poem spoken by an unborn child to nobody who can answer, made entirely of imperatives — console me, hear me, forgive me — with the lines running longer and longer as the demands accumulate, until the last stanza is a single short line. He died in 1963 of pneumonia caught underground, recording sound effects in a cave for a radio feature.

Major achievements

Life in brief

Explore the life of MacNeice — five chapters

  1. The Rectory at Carrickfergus — A mother taken away, and a childhood of fear
  2. The Poet Who Would Not Join — Oxford, the thirties, and a refusal to sign
  3. Autumn Journal — A long poem written while the news was still coming in
  4. A Poem Spoken by Someone Not Yet Born — Springboard, 1944
  5. Twenty Years of Radio, and a Cave in Yorkshire — The job his friends thought had wasted him

Read the five-chapter life of Louis MacNeice →

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