Louis MacNeice

Wystan Hugh Auden

This highly amusing and unorthodox travel book resulted from a light-hearted summer journey by the young poets Auden and MacNeice in 1936. Their letters home, in verse and prose, are full of private jokes and irreverent comments about people, politics, literature and ideas. Letters from Iceland is one of the most entertaining books in modern literature; from Auden's 'Letter to Lord Byron' and MacNeice's 'Eclogue', to the mischief and fun of their joint 'Last Will and Testament', the book is impossible to resist - a 1930s classic.

Letters from Iceland

Written between August and December 1938, Autumn Journal is still considered one of the most valuable and moving testaments of living through the thirties by a young writer. It is a record of the author's emotional and intellectual experience during those months, the trivia of everyday living set against the events of the world outside, the settlement in Munich and slow defeat in Spain. 'He completely seizes the atmosphere of the year of Munich. He tolls the knell of the political thirties with melancholy triumph.' Cyril Connolly

Autumn Journal

Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice

'I would have a poet able bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.' Louis MacNeice's prescription is designed to look ordinary, rather than esoteric, but very little poetry can claim to meet these specifications, stringent in their very wideness. MacNeice's work matches the world he famously described as 'incorrigibly plural.' Michael Longley, himself a distinguished Ulster poet, has written an introductory essay of meticulous advocacy. His wife, the critic Edna Longley, has supplied the apparatus for students and the general reader.

Selected Poems

The Strings Are False

Provides a balanced treatment of the subject discussing its sometimes disreputable history, its disciples and critics as well as astrological predictions

Astrology

Early in his career, MacNeice was identified with a group of politically committed poets whose work appeared in Michael Roberts's anthology New Signatures. MacNeice drew many of the texts for Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay from the New Signature poets. Modern Poetry was MacNeice's plea for an "impure" poetry expressive of the poet's immediate interests and his sense of the natural and the social world. Despite his association with young British poets Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, writer Christopher Isherwood, and other left-wing poets, MacNeice was as mistrustful of political programs as he was of philosophical systems. In the decades since his death in 1963, Louis MacNeice's reputation as a poet (and, indeed, amongst poets) has grown steadily, and there are now several generations of readers in Ireland, Britain, and beyond, for whom he is one of the essential poets of the twentieth century. His work has also received increasing attention from academic writers and students. For both readers and critics, the nature of MacNeice's poetic work as a whole is a matter of importance, particularly so in the brilliant return to form - and unique kinds of return on lyric form itself.

The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice

The Strings are False is Louis MacNeice's unfinished autobiography. Written when MacNeice was a young man it was only discovered and published after his death in 1963. Described by Geoffrey Grigson in the Guardian as 'the best thing Louis MacNeice ever wrote in prose' The Strings are False is being reissued in MacNeice's centenary year with a new preface by Derek Mahon.

An Unfinished Autobiography

The Strings are False

"First published by Faber and Faber Limited, London"--Title page verso.

Collected Poems

Written between August and December 1938, this poem is a record of MacNeice's emotional and intellectual experience during those months. The trivia of everyday living is set against events in the world outside - the settlement in Munich and slow defeat in Spain.

A Personal Essay

Modern Poetry

Born in Ireland, Louis MacNeice was sent to England for his schooling, to Marlborough, and then went on to read classics at Oxford. His professional life began as a lecturer in classics but in 1941 he joined the BBC and for the next twenty years produced programmes for the legendary Features Department, including his own celebrated radio play, The Dark Tower, which was broadcast for the first time in 1946, with original music by Benjamin Britten. Described by the author as 'a radio parable play', written in response to the rise of fascism in Germany and the events of World War II, The Dark Tower stages the debate about free will with reference to the ancient theme of the Quest, but in modern contexts exporing sexuality, gender, family and geography. 'The Dark Tower is in my view the best piece of writing ever done for radio.' George MacBeth

Dark Tower and Other Radio Scripts

Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907 and educated at Marlborough and Merton College, Oxford. For most of his working life he was a writer and producer for BBC radio. His death in 1963 was sudden and unexpected.

Poems

Louise MacNeice

Collected Poems, 1925-1948

Collected Poems, 1925-1948, by Louis MacNeice

In Varieties of Parable, which comprises the Clark Lectures given by Louis MacNeice at Cambridge in 1963, a few months before his death, the poet discusses the significance of 'parable' for the times in which he lived, and implictly for his own poetic. The discussion ranges widely, including Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and William Golding (new writers with whom MacNeice felt an obvious kinship), and backwards genealogically to Spenser's The Faerie Queene or Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, by way of Alice in Wonderland and the fantasy tales of George MacDonald - as well as outwards into the exemplary European fictional world of Kafka. Most importantly, MacNeice ponders the uses of parable for poetry, and Varieties of Parable stands as an implict handbook to the landscapes and 'thumbnail nightmares' of his own later verse, whose new horizons were abruptly foreshortened by the poet's untimely death in autumn 1963. Varieties of Parable stands as MacNeice's last considered statement about poetry and poetics, and one of his most atmospheric and personal acts of literary criticism.

Varieties of Parable

The Earth Compels

In the decades since his death in 1963, Louis MacNeice's reputation as a poet (and, indeed, amongst poets) has grown steadily, and there are now several generations of readers in Ireland, Britain, and beyond, for whom he is one of the essential poets of the twentieth century. His work has also received increasing attention from academic writers and students. For both readers and critics, the nature of MacNeice's poetic work as a whole is a matter of importance, and the second posthumous Collected Poems, entirely re-edited by Peter McDonald, attempts, for the first time, to print MacNeice's poetry in groupings corresponding closely to the collections published by Faber between 1935 and 1963. This makes it easier to read the poet in the published forms in which he was read by his contemporaries. In choosing to re-create the environments of MacNeice's individual volumes of poetry, moreover, this new Collected reflects the opinion that MacNeice works best in and through those separate volumes, particularly so in the brilliant return to form - and unique kinds of return on lyric form itself - of the last three collections. The texts of the poems in the new edition are based on a comparison of all printed versions, as revised in the light of the poet's later thoughts. This has resulted in a large number of changes. It is hoped that the present edition presents MacNeice's poetry more accurately, as well as more fully, than all previous collections. The new Collected Poems also includes, as appendices, The Last Ditch - the short book of poems which MacNeice published with the Cuala Press in 1940 - and The Revenant, a cycle of songs written for MacNeice's wife, the singer Hedli Anderson, a selection of uncollected early poems, and from Blind Fireworks, MacNeice's first published book of verse.

Louis MacNeice

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