W.H. Auden, “Louis MacNeice”, Encounter Nov. 1963, 48. 1 John Press, Louis MacNeice, London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1965, 17. 2 Edna Longley, Louis MacNeice: A Study, London: Faber and Faber, 1988, 117. 3 CHILDE LOUIS TO THE BROADCAST TOWER CAME: LOUIS MACNEICE, RADIO DRAMA, AND THE DISMANTLING OF YEATSIAN THEATRICAL SPACE MICHAEL A. MOIR, JR. Despite the fact that Louis MacNeice was employed by the BBC Features Department for more than twenty years and produced a number of accomplished plays in what was then a new medium, his work as a dramatist has been widely neglected. In the years following MacNeice’s death, many critics argued that his BBC employment detracted from his poetry, pointing to the relatively weak long poems he produced in the late 1940s and the 1950s. This line of argument seems to have begun in the November 1963 issue of Encounter, in which W.H. Auden ponders what might have been had his friend continued teaching instead of going into radio. John Press’s claim that “The temptation to rely on twists 1 and sleight-of-hand was dangerous to a writer of MacNeice’s facility and quickness of wit” and that “[t]he use of radiophonic devices concealed the structural weakness of the writing” is 2 typical of the sort of responses to MacNeice’s radio work that followed. As recently as 1988, Edna Longley writes that “all [MacNeice’s] dramatic output ... has the essentially subsidiary importance MacNeice attached to Yeats’s plays”. Since the 1980s, 3 though, sympathetic critics have reassessed the role radio played in developing MacNeice’s late style. Barbara Coulton, in Louis MacNeice in the BBC (1980), treats his broadcasting work as a central element in the development of his final volumes of poetry; similarly, Peter McDonald writes that “the discipline of writing