Louis MacNeice read classics at Oxford, and his professional life began as a lecturer in classics, before his career developed as a poet and broadcaster. Published in 1936 and intended primarily for the stage, MacNeice's version of The Agamemnon was immediately recognised, in the words of T. S. Eliot, as 'an accurate, almost literal translation, and at the same time as English poetry for the twentieth century. For many readers of Greek, Aeschylus is revealed as a great poet and dramatist of contemporary importance'.
