Belfast-born Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) tried his hand at all manners of writing. His novels were unsuccessful; his plays not well received. His poetry, however, was something else. It caught the eye of T.S. Eliot, MacNeice’s editor at Faber & Faber. He seemed to have held his own with W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender (a personal friend), and other poets who remain better known from the period. Even today, critics consider his poetry not quite successful (see the biographical listing at the Poetry Foundation). One area of writing where he excelled was in radio plays, and he was a scriptwriter for BBC from 1941 until his death from pneumonia in 1963. Autumn Journal, published in the spring of 1939, may well be MacNeice’s poetic high-water mark.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.
Some Thursday Readings
The Settlers – poem by Matin Rizley at Society of Classical Poets.
Winter Walk – poem by Seth Lewis.
Romanticism and the Soul of Learning – Campbell Frank Scribner at Front Porch Republic.
Literary culture can’t just dismiss AI – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.
Here We Still Stand – Joseph Bottum and Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.
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