SOURCE: Ellis, Steve. “Dante and Louis MacNeice: A Sequel to the Commedia.” In Dante's Modern Afterlife: Reception and Response from Blake to Heaney, edited by Nick Havely, pp. 128-39. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Ellis attributes the form, content, and inspiration of MacNeice's Autumn Sequel to Dante's Inferno, James Joyce's Ulysses, and MacNeice's own Autumn Journal.

The revival of interest in Louis MacNeice's work in the last fifteen years or so has not extended to any discussion of his interest in the poetry of Dante. Dante is, however, present both near the beginning and at the end of MacNeice's literary biography: at the time of his death he was starting to arrange a sequence of translations from the Inferno for radio broadcast, and in The Strings Are False he tells how he sought a refuge in books in his early years at Marlborough, being ‘particularly...