Despite being renowned as a member of the Auden Group, he was also an independently successful (albeit occasionally overlooked) poet with an influential body of work, which is replete with themes ranging from faith to mortality.

His body of work was appreciated by the public during his lifetime, due in part to his relaxed but socially and emotionally aware style.

MacNeice's father, an Anglican clergyman, would go on to become a bishop in the Church of Ireland and his mother Elizabeth née Cleshan, from Ballymaconry, Connemara, County Galway, had been a schoolmistress.

[1] MacNeice was generally happy at Sherborne, which gave an education concentrating on the Classics (Greek and Latin) and literature (including the memorising of poetry).

Marlborough was a less happy place, with a hierarchical and sometimes cruel social structure, but MacNeice's interest in ancient literature and civilisation deepened and expanded to include Egyptian and Norse mythology.

In 1922, he was invited to join Marlborough's secret 'Society of Amici'[2] where he was a contemporary of John Betjeman and Anthony Blunt, forming a lifelong friendship with the latter.

Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis were already part of Auden's circle, but MacNeice's closest Oxford friends were John Hilton, Christopher Holme and Graham Shepard, who had been with him at Marlborough.

MacNeice threw himself into the aesthetic culture, publishing poetry in literary magazines The Cherwell and Sir Galahad, organising candle-lit readings of Shelley and Marlowe, and visiting Paris with Hilton.

John MacNeice (by now Archdeacon of Connor, and a Bishop a few years later) was horrified to discover his son was engaged to a Jew, while Ezra's family demanded assurances that Louis's brother's Down's syndrome was not hereditary.

[1][4] The newlyweds were found lodgings in Birmingham by E. R. Dodds (a Professor of Greek and MacNeice's future literary executor) and his wife Bet.

The MacNeices lived in a former coachman's cottage in the grounds of a house in Selly Park belonging to another professor, Philip Sargant Florence.

Auden knew many Marxists, and Blunt had also become a communist by this time, but MacNeice, although sympathetic to the left, was always sceptical of easy answers and "the armchair reformist".

The Strings are False (written at the time of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) describes his wish for a change in society and even revolution, but also his intellectual opposition to Marxism and especially the communism embraced by many of his friends.

[1] In November, Mary left MacNeice and their infant son for a Russian-American graduate student called Charles Katzmann who had been staying with the family.

In October, MacNeice left Birmingham for a lecturing post in the Department of Greek at Bedford College for Women, part of the University of London.

By Christmas, Nancy was in love with Stephen Spender's brother Michael, whom she was later to marry, and at the end of the year MacNeice visited Barcelona shortly before the city fell to Franco.

MacNeice worked as a freelance journalist (he had resigned from his lecturing position at Bedford College while in America) and was awaiting the publication of Plant and Phantom, which was dedicated to Clark (the previous year, the Cuala Press had published The Last Ditch, a limited edition containing some poems that would appear in the new volume).

The radio play Christopher Columbus, produced in 1942 and later published as a book, featured music by William Walton, conducted by Adrian Boult, and starred Laurence Olivier.

1943's He Had a Date (loosely based on the life and death of MacNeice's friend Graham Shepard but also semi-autobiographical) was also published, as was The Dark Tower (1946, again with music by Britten).

In 1947, the BBC sent MacNeice to report on Indian independence and partition, and he continued to produce plays for the corporation, including a six-part radio adaptation of Goethe's Faust in 1949.

[4] Patrick Leigh Fermor had previously been Deputy Director of the Institute, and he and his future wife, the Honourable Joan Elizabeth Rayner (née Eyres Monsell), became close friends of the MacNeices.

The family returned to England in August 1951, and Dan (who had been at an English boarding school) left for America in early 1952 to stay with his mother, to avoid national service.

The death of Dylan Thomas came partway through the writing of the poem, and MacNeice involved himself in memorials for the poet and attempts to raise money for his family.

1953 and 1954 brought lecture and performance tours of the USA (husband and wife would present an evening of song, monologue and poetry readings), and meetings with John Berryman (on the returning boat in 1953, and later in London) and Eleanor Clark (by now married to Robert Penn Warren).

At this time MacNeice became increasingly independent of spirit, spending time with other writers, including Dominic Behan with whom he regularly drank to oblivion; the two men spent a particularly drunken night in the home of Cecil Woodham-Smith during a curious meeting in Ireland whilst Behan was working on assignment as a writer for Life magazine and MacNeice on assignment with the BBC.

[14] Longley has edited two selections of his work, and Muldoon gives more space to MacNeice than to any other author in his Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, which covers the period from the death of W. B. Yeats until 1986.