Poet, critic, and broadcaster Louis MacNeice was an influential member of the generation of British poets who came to artistic maturity in the 1930s. Born the son of a Protestant minister (later a bishop) in Belfast, and raised in nearby Carrickfergus, MacNeice would live most of his adult life in England, where he balanced the literary fame he enjoyed from the 1930s onwards with a career at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) that lasted from 1941 until his death in 1963. Though professionally and personally connected to other major poets of the 1930s, MacNeice wrote verse that tended to eschew the fervent commitments of that decade in favor of an attention to sense perception and a wry, sophisticated skepticism directed equally at political, national, and religious affiliations.