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“... This is the first of two volumes in which Alan Heuser is making a selection of Louis MacNeice’s occasional writings. The first is mainly his reviews of Classical and modern literature; the second will bring together his fugitive pieces on philosophy, history, travel and autobiography. The currently renewed interest in MacNeice arises from two considerations: one, that he deserves better than to be regarded as merely one of Auden’s acolytes; two, that he may be seen as precursor to the young poets in Northern Ireland who have been making a stir, if not a Renaissance, since 1968 ...”

“... Why did Louis MacNeice have to wait thirty years for a biography? He died comparatively young – aged 55 – and was outlived by almost everyone he knew: wives, girlfriends, classmates, colleagues. He led an active public life, had two careers – in universities and with the BBC – and was well known as a poet from quite early on ...”

“... As Louis MacNeice lay dying in 1963, his last major work, a radio play called Persons from Porlock, was broadcast by the BBC. It is about a painter called Hank, who starts well in the 1930s, but whose development, as MacNeice explains in a note, ‘is interrupted by the war ...”

“... Louis MacNeice wrote stylish lyric poems and was at his best when brief and autobiographical. One way or another, he always was autobiographical. But the short poems often succeed because they seem sincere and understated; longer works, like his Autumn Journal and Autumn Sequel and many of his radio plays, run the risk of monotony and a kind of narcissism ...”

“... Louis MacNeice’s influence is everywhere in contemporary poetry, in its forms and in its forms of engagement. Certain strands in his work – questions of identity, nationality, responsibility – became, with the advent of the Troubles, critically important to a celebrated generation of Northern Irish poets, poets like Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Muldoon ...”

“... about Iceland. He spent three months in the country, part of the time travelling with his friend Louis MacNeice and a group of schoolboys and a teacher from Bryanston School. Auden and MacNeice collaborated in the writing of the book, which was published in 1937 as Letters from Iceland. It contained not only Auden’s ...”

“... In ‘The Cave of Making’, his elegy for MacNeice, Auden describes his friend as a ‘lover of women and Donegal’. The geography seems a bit wrong – the Irish counties in MacNeice’s heart were surely Antrim and Galway – but the terms are apt enough for the man in the poems: a lover, certainly, and of both women and the land of his birth ...”

“... after all, is ‘The Twitter Machine’? Is it the human mind, which, to borrow a phrase from Louis MacNeice, ‘clicks like scissors’, snipping out instructions for the creation of language? Does it refer to what most of us mean by ‘language’, the working components, audible or visible, of speech and writing? Or might it be a merry metaphor ...”

“... accounted for the reception of The Orators when it appeared in May 1932. By the end of that year, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same ...”

“... headings, with only occasional passages of explanation or commentary. Similarly, his editing (with Louis Kronenberger) of A Book of Aphorisms (1962) expressed a collector’s delight in showing off his treasures.In the foreword to what is generally regarded as his best critical work, The Dyer’s Hand, published in 1962, he articulated a similar preference ...”

“... American writers, about their British counterparts much less so. He observed at one point that Louis MacNeice sometimes sounded like ‘a serious Ogden Nash’. There has been no British critic so finely tuned to the sound of the modern as Wilson was in his two great decades. Neither Leavis nor Empson was conspicuously successful in discovering young ...”

“... to an unsatisfactory present – ‘Man is in love and loves what vanishes’ – and (as Louis MacNeice has it) ‘in defiance of the Gaelic League’ and all it stood for, doesn’t in the least detract from its efficacy. As for ‘tradition’ and the literary critics’ ‘valorisation’ of it – McCormack advises us to bear in mind the ...”

“... of national distinctiveness. Such a past needn’t be beyond one’s own recall, as we find in Louis MacNeice’s enumeration of the egregious inheritances of Ulster: The linen mills, the long wet grass, the ragged hawthorn. And one read black where the other read white, his hope The other man’s damnation: Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope, And ...”

“... Crabbe, Hopkins, Whitman, Campion, Morris, Christina Rossetti, John Crowe Ransom, Wyndham Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Stevie Smith. I would think a life of diverse affections could be made upon such affiliations. But Grigson seems to need to be enraged or disgusted, too. Else why would he go to the disfiguring bother of writing, publishing and reprinting his ...”

“... wool, acrobatic young boys (Sebastian and Fabian were nicknamed ‘the blue-eyed thugs’ by Louis MacNeice), pears on a platter, the family cats (who appear in more than half of the paintings here). But there is something else at play, too, something fantastical. In its ominous stillness Sark Interior, painted in 1947, reminds me of Dorothea ...”