The collected poems of louis macneice prayer
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Yet unlike Auden, who left us ‘Stop All the Clocks’, MacNeice can be more difficult to pin down to one or two ‘best poems’ or ‘best-known poems’.
For more twentieth-century poetry, see our pick of the best fruit poems, our piece about Brexit and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, our thoughts on H. D.’s WWII poem Trilogy, and our discussion of William Empson’s challenging poetry.
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Archive of Frederick Louis MacNeice
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Oxford, Bodleian Libraries [followed by shelfmark and folio or page reference, e.g.
He continued to write - chiefly poems and stories of satire and fantasy - and in time became friendly with other poets, notably W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Clere Parsons. In 1930, MacNeice graduated with a ‘First’ in literae humaniores, and having just obtained a lectureship in classics at the University of Birmingham, he married Giovanna Marie Thérèse Babette (‘Mary’) Ezra (1908–1991), daughter of David Ezra and stepdaughter of John Beazley, on 21 June.
During his years in Birmingham, MacNeice continued to write, including the novel Roundabout Way (1932) under the pseudonym Louis Malone, contributions to New Verse and other periodicals, and a second volume of Poems (1935).Here: ‘The morning after was the first day.’ And end, too, is a beginning.
And with that, if you’d like to begin exploring the rest of Louis MacNeice’s great poetry, we recommend his Collected Poems.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The Irish poet Louis MacNeice (1907-63) is often associated with the Thirties Poets, along with W.
H. Auden and Stephen Spender.
One of Louis MacNeice’s most popular and best-known poems, ‘Snow’ is a description of the snow falling outside the window. Bronchitis evolved into viral pneumonia, with which he was admitted to St Leonard’s Hospital in London on 27 August. They arrived in eight batches between 1983 and 1996, and were purchased by the Library in 1997.
‘Snow’. In 1908, the MacNeice family moved to Carrickfergus, where Louis MacNeice's father was rector from 1908 to 1931. Most of this material was subsequently acquired by the University of Texas at Austin, where it can now be found at the Harry Ransom Centre, as Acquisition 13-11-002-P (2013).
Finding Aid & Administrative Information
- Title
- Catalogue of the Archive of Frederick Louis MacNeice
- Status
- Published
- Author
- Finding aid prepared by Svenja Kunze, based on lists by Judith Priestman
- Date
- 2018
- Language of description
- English
- Script of description
- Latin
- Sponsor
- Catalogued with the generous support of private donors.
‘Meeting Point’. In August 1963, Louis MacNeice went caving in Yorkshire to gather sound effects for his radio play Persons from Porlock. 1549-1617). ‘Prayer Before Birth’.
Another poem written during the Second World War, ‘Prayer Before Birth’ muses about the kind of world that an as-yet-unborn child will be brought into.
Here is our pick of Louis MacNeice’s finest poems.
1. After a funeral in London on 7 September, his ashes were interred in Carrodore Churchyard, Ireland.
Before his death MacNeice had been assembling the poems for The Burning Perch (1963), which was published on 13 September 1963. Yet these things have the potential to become ‘other than themselves’, an idea expressed through metaphor (a tree becomes a ‘talking tower’, for instance).Its chilling closing line, ‘I am I although the dead are dead’, is particularly haunting given the poem’s publication date in 1940 – this is another poem that seems to respond to the horror going on in Europe.
6.
Amongst other works published posthumously were a book on Astrology commissioned by Aldous Books (1964), Selected Poems (1964) edited by W.H. Auden, the autobiography The Strings are False (1965) edited by MacNeice’s friend and literary executor E.R. Dodds, as well as (radio) plays The Mad Islands and The Administrator (1964), One for the Grave (1968), Persons from Porlock (1969), and the song cycle The Revenant, originally written in 1942 for Hedli MacNeice.
Based on: MacNeice, (Frederick) Louis (1907–1963), M.Davin revised by Jon Stallworthy, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2009.
Arrangement
The arrangement in four main sequences (correspondence; literary papers; personal papers and miscellaneous; papers of Hedli MacNeice) was introduced to the archive when it was partially sorted after it was purchased by the Bodleian Library in 1997.
MS. Res. c. And what will that child grow up to be, given the horrors and atrocities being witnessed every day?