Frederick Louis MacNeice (12 September 1907 – 3 September 1963) was an Irish poet, playwright and producer for the BBC. Known for its exploration of introspection, empiricism, and belonging, his poetic work is now considered among the twentieth century's greatest. 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. Never as overtly or simplistically political as some of his contemporaries, he expressed a humane opposition to totalitarianism as well as an acute awareness of his roots.

MacNeice was awarded the CBE in the 1958 New Year Honours list.

Louis MacNeice (known as Freddie until his teens, when he adopted his middle name) was born in Belfast, the youngest son of Rev. John Frederick and Elizabeth Margaret ("Lily") MacNeice. Both were originally from the west of Ireland. 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. The family moved to Carrickfergus, County Antrim, soon after MacNeice's birth.

When MacNeice was six, his mother was admitted to a Dublin nursing home suffering from severe clinical depression and he did not see her again. She survived uterine cancer but died of tuberculosis in December 1914. MacNeice later described the cause of his mother's death as "obscure", and blamed his mother's cancer on his own difficult birth. His brother William, who had Down syndrome, had been sent to live in an institution in Scotland during his mother's terminal illness. In 1917, his father remarried to Georgina Greer and MacNeice's sister Elizabeth was sent to board at a preparatory school at Sherborne, England. MacNeice joined her at Sherborne Preparatory School later in the year.

MacNeice was generally happy at Sherborne, which gave an education concentrating on the Classics (Greek and Latin) and literature (including the memorising of poetry). He was an enthusiastic sportsman, something which continued when he moved to Marlborough College in 1921, having won a classical scholarship. 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' where he was a contemporary of John Betjeman and Anthony Blunt, forming a lifelong friendship with the latter. He also wrote poetry and essays for the school magazines. By the end of his time at the school, MacNeice was sharing a study with Blunt and also sharing his aesthetic tastes, though not his sexual ones; Blunt said MacNeice was "totally, irredeemably heterosexual". In November 1925, MacNeice was awarded a postmastership to Merton College, Oxford, and he left Marlborough in the summer of the following year. He left behind his birth name of Frederick, his accent and his father's faith, although he never lost a sense of his Irishness; (the BBC radio premiere of MacNeice's The Dark Tower in January 1946, was preceded by the poet's ten-minute introduction in his distinctive Ulster accent.)

It was during his first year as a student at Oxford that MacNeice first met W. H. Auden, who had gained a reputation as the university's foremost poet during the preceding year. 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. Auden would become a lifelong friend who inspired MacNeice to take up poetry seriously.

In 1928 he was introduced to the Classics don John Beazley and his stepdaughter Mary Ezra. A year later he thought to soften the news that he had been arrested for drunkenness by telegraphing his father to say he was engaged to be married to Mary. 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. Amidst this turmoil MacNeice published four poems in Oxford Poetry, 1929 and his first undergraduate collection Blind Fireworks (1929). Published by Gollancz, the volume was dedicated to "Giovanna" (Mary's full name was Giovanna Marie Thérèse Babette). In 1930 the couple were married at Oxford Register Office, neither set of parents attending the ceremony. He was awarded a first-class degree in literae humaniores, and had already gained an appointment as Assistant Lecturer in Classics at the University of Birmingham.

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. Bet was a lecturer in the Department of English. 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. Birmingham was a very different university (and city) from Oxford, MacNeice was not a natural lecturer, and he found it difficult to write poetry. He turned instead to a semi-autobiographical novel, Roundabout Way, which was published in 1932 under the name of Louis Malone as he feared a novel by an academic would not be favourably reviewed. He felt that married life was not helping his poetry: "To write poems expressing doubt or melancholy, an anarchist conception of freedom or nostalgia for the open spaces (and these were the things that I wanted to express), seemed disloyal to Mariette. Instead I was disloyal to myself, wrote a novel which purported to be an idyll of domestic felicity. As we predicted, the novel was not well received."