LOUIS MACNEICE

In the decades since his death in 1963, Louis MacNeices 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 MacNeices 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 MacNeices 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 MacNeices 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 poets later thoughts. This has resulted in a large number of changes. It is hoped that the present edition presents MacNeices 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 MacNeices wife, the singer Hedli Anderson, a selection of uncollected early poems, and from Blind Fireworks, MacNeices first published book of verse.

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 MacNeices prescription is designed to look ordinary, rather than esoteric, but very little poetry can claim to meet these specifications, stringent in their very wideness. MacNeices 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.

Louis MacNeice is increasingly recognised as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and his work has been a defining influence upon a generation of Irish poets that includes Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon.The Selected Letters is indispensable as a resource for an understanding of the intellectual culture of the mid-twentieth century. A Classics don, poet, playwright and globetrotting BBC producer, the medley and blend of MacNeices cultural influences seems exemplary in its modernity. He kept up a significant correspondence with E. R. Dodds, Anthony Blunt and T. S. Eliot, to name but three prominent figures of the time.During his time at the BBC MacNeice witnessed many key events, including the partition of India in 1947 and the independence of the Gold Coast from Britain in 1957, and these are recorded in two long sequences to his wife, the singer Hedli Anderson.His complex relationship to Ireland and to his Irish heritages speak resonantly to contemporary debates about Irish and Northern Irish cultural identity. Finally, the Letters will do much to broaden our understanding of a vivid and often enigmatic personality whose varied life and individual charisma have often resisted explanation.

I go the zoo half because I like looking at the animals and half because I like looking at the people... The pleasure of dappled things, the beauty of adaptation to purpose, the glory of extravagance, classic elegance or romantic nonsense and grotesquerie - all these we get from the Zoo.In 1938 Louis MacNeice published his second collection of poems with Faber; his personal essayModern Poetry for OUP; and Zoo, a prose commission from Michael Joseph to write an impressionistic guide to the London Zoo in Regents Park. Envisioned as a breezy assignment MacNeices Zoo inevitably became a richer endeavour, taking in side-trips to Paris and Belfast. Zoo also benefited from illustrations by the painter Nancy Sharp, with whom MacNeice had begun an affair after moving to London in 1936.This Faber Finds edition returns to circulation a delightful rarity by one of the twentieth centurys most brilliant poets.

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 authors 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.

El gran Géiser, fiordos y glaciares; aguas sulfurosas, ríos blanquecinos, arenas grises, desierto, lava. Carnero ahumado, pescado a la salazón, patatas dulces, sopas dulces. Historia, leyendas, proverbios,costumbres. Joyce, Jane Austen, Duke Ellington, el psicoanalisis. Cartas de Islandia (1937) es uno de los libros de viajes mas originales que jamas se haya escrito. Con mezcla de prosa y verso, informacion para turistas y reportaje con el trasfondo de la Guerra Civil española y el ascenso de Hitler. Divertida, ingeniosa y muy original.Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) y Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) son dos de los mayores y mas reconocidos poetas en lengua inglesa de este siglo. Ambos formaron parte de las corrientes de vanguardia de los años treinta. Auden es autor de libretos para Stravinski, tradujo a Brecht, es autor de los libros de poesia Otro tiempo (1940) y The Double Man o The Age of Anxiety (1947). Obtuvo el Premio Pulitzer. MacNeice tradujo el Fausto de Goethe y es autor de Autumm Journal (1938) y Solstices (1961).

Diario de otoño es un largo poema de estructura diarística dividido en veinticuatro secciones, escrito a finales de 1938. Considerado el libro más emblemático de Louis MacNeice, recoge las impresiones personales del autor ante los acontecimientos que se suceden en Europa a lo largo de ese otoño convulso, mezclando sus vivencias personales ?su matrimonio fracasado, sus clases de griego en la universidad, las evocaciones de su infancia, el dia a dia londinense? con reflexiones filosoficas y la descripcion documental del clima politico y social europeo del momento, incluyendo la Guerra Civil española. Casi una elegia (auto)biografica, el diario-poema esta escrito en versos de medida desigual que se alejan del patron yambico y en los que lo publico y lo privado se mezclan para mostrar todas las mascaras del autor ?el anarquista, el derrotista, el hedonista, el filosofo, el aspirante a buen ciudadano? en un intento de alcanzar la honestidad en un texto a mitad de camino entre la lirica y el poema didactico. Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) fue un poeta y dramaturgo irlandes. Nacido en Belfast, a los diez años ingresa en un internado en Inglaterra, pais en el que viviria el resto de su vida. Sera en Oxford donde conozca a Auden, a cuyo circulo ya pertenecian Stephen Spender y Cecil Day-Lewis, y entrara a formar parte de su grupo, si bien no comparte del todo sus ideas politicas: MacNeice siempre sera un esceptico y un outsider. Ya consagrado como uno de los poetas mas importantes de la decada de los treinta gracias a su libro Poems de 1935, MacNeice visita España en dos ocasiones, en 1936 y 1937, durante la Guerra Civil. Las impresiones que le causa, junto a la sensacion de que Inglaterra se dirige hacia una guerra inevitable con Alemania, se plasmaran en Diario de otoño, escrito a lo largo de la segunda mitad de 1938. Ademas de escribir numerosos libros de poemas, colaboro con varias piezas para la BBC y escribio un puñado de obras de teatro (con colaboraciones ocasionales de Benjamin Britten). Su adaptacion del Agamenon de Esquilo sigue siendo canonica.