Editing Louis MacNeice (section)

===Birmingham, 1930–1936===
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."<ref Name="PF" />

The local Classical Association included [[George Augustus Auden]], Professor of Public Health and father of [[W. H. Auden]], and by 1932 MacNeice and Auden's Oxford acquaintance had turned into a close friendship. Auden knew many [[Marxism|Marxists]], and Blunt had also become a [[Communist party|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.

MacNeice started to write poetry again, and in January 1933 he and Auden led the first edition of [[Geoffrey Grigson]]'s magazine ''New Verse''. MacNeice also started sending poems to [[T. S. Eliot]] at around this time, and although Eliot did not feel that they merited [[Faber and Faber]] publishing a volume of poems, several were published in Eliot's journal ''[[The Criterion]]''. On 15 May 1934, Louis and Mary's son Daniel John MacNeice was born. In September of that year, MacNeice travelled to Dublin with Dodds, who had [[Fianna Fáil|republican]] sympathies, and met [[William Butler Yeats]]. Unsuccessful attempts at playwriting and another novel were followed in September 1935 by ''Poems'', the first of his collections for Faber and Faber, who would remain his publishers. This helped establish MacNeice as one of the new poets of the 1930s.<ref Name="PF" />

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.<ref Name="PF" /> MacNeice engaged a nurse to look after Dan, and his sister and stepmother also helped on occasion. In early 1936, Blunt and MacNeice visited Spain, shortly after the election of the [[Popular Front (Spain)|Popular Front]] government. Auden and MacNeice travelled to Iceland in the summer of that year, which resulted in ''[[Letters from Iceland]]'', a collection of poems, letters (some in verse) and essays. In October, MacNeice left Birmingham for a lecturing post in the Department of Greek at [[Bedford College (London)|Bedford College for Women]], part of the [[University of London]].