SOURCE: Whitehead, John. “Chapter Seven” and “Chapter Twelve.” In A Commentary on the Poetry of W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, pp. 80-7; 134-42. Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992.

In the first excerpt below, Whitehead describes Out of the Picture as a collection of poems with diverse themes and rhythms, and regards The Earth Compels as strongly influenced by MacNeice's wife Mary, who abandoned him and his son. In the second excerpt, he explores MacNeice's pre-war poems in The Last Ditch and Plant and Phantom—poems that were largely written in America—and the poems he wrote during World War II that are collected in Springboard and The Revenant.

The years immediately following his coming to London were for MacNeice ones of crowded literary activity. Besides translating the Agamemnon and collaborating with Auden on the Iceland travel book he wrote a...