MacNeice's premature death provoked an outpouring of tribute and elegy. He was mourned by his elders and juniors alike. Eliot distinguished him from his contemporaries, insisting ‘He had the Irishman's unfailing ear for the music of verse, and he never published a line that is not good reading’. Larkin identified key qualities in MacNeice's writing which made him an attractive model for a younger generation of poets: his status as a ‘town observer’, and his absorption in ‘our everyday life’, as well as his sensitivity to ‘the crucifying memory, the chance irrevocably lost’, in the later work. On a different level, the American poets Robert Lowell and John Berryman wrote elegies which are part of their long sequences History and The Dream Songs. Lowell's poem translates the ambience of MacNeice's childhood into a characteristically Lowellian idiom: ‘A dozen children would visit half a dozen;/ downstairs a lost child bullied the piano’. For Berryman, ‘Louis’ was ‘the lovely man’, yet ‘was not the character of myth’, having to be told about ‘Leigh-MalloryV remark: “Because it is there”’ which would eventually find its way into Autumn Sequel to explain ‘why/ Men should climb Everest’ (CP 384)

MacNeice's colleagues and contemporaries offered more intimate portraits of him. Auden gave the address at his memorial service in October 1963, which pays generous tribute to his qualities as a man as well as a poet. A year later, ‘The Cave of Making’ configures MacNeice as a congenial friend and an ally in poetry as an ‘unpopular art’ which ‘stubbornly still insists upon/ being read or ignored’. Anthony Thwaite's ‘For Louis MacNeice’ offers a snapshot of MacNeice at the BBC in the later 1950s, which conveys the awe the young poet felt for the older man.

In contrast, Spender, who had always had a difficult relationship with MacNeice, delayed producing a poem wholly about him until the late 1970s. ‘Louis MacNeice’ is a haunting and unsentimental poem which frankly depicts him as a cryptic and bewildering acquaintance with the power to humiliate. Spender's MacNeice ‘half-beckoned you up into his high mind/ For a shared view of your clumsiness -/ I mean, me, of mine’ (NCP 322).