SOURCE: McDonald, Peter. “Louis MacNeice's Posterity.” Princeton University Library Chronicle 59, no. 3 (spring 1998): 376-97.

In the following excerpt, McDonald notes the influence of Irish poet Louis MacNeice on Mahon's work, particularly in the themes of loneliness and alienation. He highlights the younger poet's affinity for his predecessor's resignation to the relentlessness of time and temporality.

In his volume Visitations (1957), Louis MacNeice published the short poem “To Posterity,” in which a speaker in mid-career (MacNeice was then fifty years old) tries to look beyond the horizon of his own contemporary reception. In fact, that career was closer to being over than either the poet or his readers could reasonably have supposed, for MacNeice was to publish only another two collections, Solstices (1961) and the (just) posthumous The Burning Perch (1963), dying a week or so short of his fifty-sixth birthday. “To Posterity” addresses a far future with an open question:

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