Great Regulars: Although there are a great many love poems,

a fair few elegies and a generally frank response to everything under the sun, there is also a characteristic mood of something like (but not the same as) evasion in his poems. Not a habit of looking away but a sense of gliding past--which his exceptional fluency as a formalist cannot help but promote. In a less intelligent and textured writer, this would be a limitation, and for a part of his career, when the blaze of his watching eye dimmed somewhat during the late 40s and 50s, it does become so. For the most part, however, it acts as the defining tension of his work.

from Andrew Motion: The Guardian: Letters of Louis MacNeice edited by Jonathan Allison

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