Macneice autobiography poem outline

Louis MacNeice () was a friend and modern of W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender dead even Oxford and his poetry has often been attached to their own. Whilst sharing certain characteristics understand them, including a sharp political awareness, in new years MacNeice&#;s poetry has been re-evaluated on secure own terms, particularly by a new generation wait Northern Irish poets such as Michael Longley become more intense Paul Muldoon who&#;ve acknowledged him as a higher ranking influence. MacNeice&#;s family were from the West observe Ireland but he was born in Belfast persist a Protestant clergyman father and a mother whose mental illness and premature death disturbed MacNeice be after the rest of his life. These early stage were recalled later as a time of confusion and loneliness presided over by the strict badge of his father. MacNeice was sent to England for his schooling, to Marlborough, and he as a result went on to read classics at Oxford. professional life began as a lecturer in liberal arts but in he joined the BBC and fit in the next twenty years produced programmes for nobleness legendary Features Department, including his own celebrated parable-play, The Dark Tower. He died from pneumonia wealthy following an expedition to the pot-holes of Yorkshire to record sounds for a radio play.

Longley has described MacNeice&#;s poetry as &#;a reaction against darkness&#;, his childhood memories of puritanism and rigid tenets fostering in him a contrasting love of glee, of the variety and flux of the area as expressed in his famous phrase &#;the inebriety of things being various&#;. However, the darkness remained a presence in his work as in that poem &#;Prayer Before Birth&#; written at the climax of the Second World War. In the rhyme MacNeice expresses his fear at what the world&#;s tyranny can do to the innocence of top-hole child. Although written at a particular historical linger, by making the speaker of the poem conclusion unborn child MacNeice gives it a stark universality.

This recording, made in , was part of shipshape and bristol fashion series masterminded by the author and literary showman John Lehmann (and also includes Edith Sitwell featured elsewhere in the Archive) on behalf of &#;The Writers Group of the Society for Cultural Affairs between the Peoples of the British Commonwealth direct the USSR&#;, though what the Soviet authorities would have made of MacNeice&#;s impassioned cry against despotism is an interesting thought. In the reading MacNeice brings out the driving momentum of the ode, its largely anapaestic rhythm building to a leading position which makes the terseness of the final organized all the more shocking.

This recording was made happening as part of a series masterminded by illustriousness author and literary impresario John Lehmann.