SOURCE: Peacock, Alan. “Received Religion and Secular Vision: MacNeice and Kavanagh.” In Irish Writers and Religion, edited by Robert Welch, pp. 148-68. Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe, 1992.

In the following excerpt, Peacock compares MacNeice's poetry with that of the classical Roman poet Horace, noting the thematic similarities of agnosticism and man's evanescent existence.

Louis MacNeice was never a flag-bearer for any wave of technical innovation in poetry; in his ideas he avoided extremes; and his subject-matter is often everyday, urban and based on observations and impressions which are not obviously outside the scope of anyone's intelligent response to modern life. So, at any rate, ran a very durable notion of his poetic personality: ‘very much the poet as an urban man, speaking to urban men’.¹ MacNeice's freedom from conspicuous obscurity and his disinclination to parade his intellect and learning have always ensured a certain readability and popularity; but...