SOURCE: McDonald, Peter. “Louis MacNeice: Irony and Responsibility.” In The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, edited by Matthew Campbell, pp. 59-75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

In the following essay, McDonald provides an overview of MacNeice's life and career and examines the conflicting images in his poems that represent the emotional, personal, and political aspects of his life.

In an uncollected poem of 1995, ‘MacNeice's London’, Derek Mahon imagines Louis MacNeice in wartime, in ‘A bunker of civilised sound, / A BBC studio’:

                                                                      Thirty years dead I see your ghost, as the Blitz carooms overhead, Dissolve into a smoke-ring, meditative, Classic, outside time and space, Alone with itself, in the presence of the nations, Well-bred, dry, the voice Of London, speaking of lost illusions.(1) 

These lines capture, in a brilliant miniature, much of the complexity of Louis MacNeice's cultural and historical situations. While the adjectives here—‘meditative’, ‘classic’, ‘alone’, ‘well-bred...