Note about Louis MacNeice from James O’Fee

Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) was a near contemporary of C.S. Lewis, and the two men had much in common:

a. raised in pious Ulster middle-class families
b. sent away to school in England where they lost Christian faith
c. won scholarships to Oxford
d. took 1st Class Degrees in Classics
e. yearned to make their name as poets
f. became masters of the medium then called the ‘wireless’

The two men met once in Oxford (recorded in Lewis’s diary), but their world outlook was different and they held opposed views on the role of Modernism in poetry. MacNeice supported his friend C. Day Lewis in his successful campaign for the Oxford Poetry Chair – against C. S. Lewis.

[More from O’Fee about Louis MacNeice in Issue 86.)