Collected Poems

by Louis MacNeice

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 Poems" 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.

Genres: Poetry, Ireland, Irish Literature, British Literature, Classics

800 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1949

About the author

Born to Irish parents in Belfast, MacNeice was largely educated in English prep schools. He attended Oxford University, there befriending W.H. Auden.

He was part of the generation of "thirties poets" which included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis; nicknamed "MacSpaunday" as a group — a name invented by Roy Campbell, in his Talking Bronco (1946). His body of work was widely appreciated by the public during his lifetime, due in part to his relaxed, but socially and emotionally aware style. Never as overtly (or simplistically) political as some of his contemporaries, his work shows a humane opposition to totalitarianism as well as an acute awareness of his Irish roots.

Reviews

[Ulysse · Rating 4 out of 5]

MacNeice and the Golden Fleece

Tell me who is this Louis MacNeice?
—A scholar a drinker a poet
And did he capture the Golden Fleece?
—You’ll have to read him to find out

And tell me who is this Louis MacNeice?
—A dapper young man born in Belfast
And did he wear a Golden Fleece?
—He was naked from sundown to breakfast

And tell me who is this Louis MacNeice?
—Born in the year nineteen-oh-seven
Was that the year of the Golden Fleece?
—It was a bad year to be born in

And tell me who is this Louis MacNeice?
—He died in nineteen-sixty-three
Chasing after the Golden Fleece?
—After a ramble in the country

And tell me who is this Louis MacNeice?
—Why don’t you ask one of his friends?
A companion of the Golden Fleece?
—MacSpaunday will answer your questions

Tell me who is this Louis MacNeice?
Do people still read him today?
And liken his work to a Golden Fleece?
—None too many I daresay

Oh tell me who is this Louis MacNeice?
—I don’t know but he wrote very well
And is he worth a Golden Fleece?
—That's something I really can’t tell

Do tell me who is this Louis MacNeice?
—Will you stop asking that question?
Don’t you care for the Golden Fleece?
—I should but my name isn't Jason

[Neil Fulwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Damn near 800 pages of poetry (though you can easily skip a chunk of the appendiced material on account of quality control and/or repetition) and not all of it top-flight, but enough of it hits the heights to vouchsafe MacNeice’s reputation. He’s generally at his best when he (a) uses humour and wordplay, and (b) goes on train journeys.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

The mega-ass MacNeice collection that he himself oversaw. Pretty much everything that you could want out of the guy is here. All the lengthy, lovely longer poems, his short evocations of nature, towns, and gentle things. The latter is his strength: MacNeice has a fine voice for the neglected underpinnings of the world, fragile and otherwise and I tend to favor these poems over his classical/thematic works.

[Kevin Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dipped in and out of this book for many a month and came away very impressed with MacNeice as a poet -- it's a shame he seems to have been overshadowed by Auden (who I guess he resembles but has a less arch quality to him, in my opinion.) I also think he gets a bum rap for being remembered primarily for his poem "Bagpipe Music," which is a fine poem but certainly not his only fine poem or even his finest. He always exerts a steady control over the forms of his poems but doesn't distort his intelligence to fit into the forms -- see how deftly he ties together past, present, and future through repetition in this small poem, "Coda":

Maybe we knew each other better
When the night was young and unrepeated
And the moon stood still over Jericho.

So much for the past; in the present
There are moments caught between heart‑beats
When maybe we know each other better.

But what is that clinking in the darkness?
Maybe we shall know each other better
When the tunnels meet beneath the mountain.

That is very good. Seems the book might already be out-of-print in the U.S., which is a shame since I had to burrow it from the library; nevertheless, copied out a number of poems scattered across his writing life that I hope to return to in the future and ponder over some more.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't remember reading Louis MacNeice before diving into these Collected Poems. I was quickly in love with his poetry and never tired of reading him, though this is quite a large volume. MacNeice was a formal poet. He worked in formal structures and and meters and almost always with rhyme. Some poets find poetic formality restricting, find that it confines lyricism, but MacNeice soars. His poems ripple with energy and read so fluidly that, given the abundance of poetry he wrote, it makes me think it came naturally to him. He reminds me of Auden that way. Another reason for liking him is that his poems are verbally expansive and treat their subjects fully. There are few poems here I'd call short. My favorites are the poems of the 121-page "Autumn Sequel" containing 26 masterful cantos written in terza rima. I like Louis MacNeice, who left us, young, in 1963, as much as any new poet I've read recently.

[SBC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Louis MacNeice has a lovely way with words and his themes and imagery are intellectually interesting and beautiful to read.

Favourite poems:
**Nature Notes
**Sleeping Winds
**The Snow man
*To Mary - Forgive what I give you.
*Mutations -Yet each of us has known mutations in the mind/When the world jumped and what had been a plan/Dissolved and rivers gushed from what had seemed a pool.' 'For every static world that you and I impose upont he real one must crack at times and new patterns from new disorders open like a rose'
*Precursors - one or two who carry an emerald lamp behind their faces and - during thunderstorms - the light comes shining through
**Prayer before birth
**Cradlesong for Eleanor
Plain speaking - the only decent definition is tautology
The Return - the harlequinade of water through a sluice
The Park
Evening in Connecticut
Conversation
Round the Corner
When we were children -
Babel
Nostalgia - homesick for the hollow heart of the Milky Way the soundless clapper calls and we would follow but earth and will are stronger and we stay
Brother Fire

To the public - Why hold that poets are so sensitive?'; 'will continue/Throwing our dreams and guts in people's faces'
To posterity
April Fool - Here come I, my hair on fire, Between the devil and dthe deep. Fool me over, fool me down, Sea shall dry and devil shall drown.
Dreams in Middle Age - 'Sooner let nightmares whinny'; 'Our lives are bursting at the seams with petty detail' 'sooner let the dark engulf us. Sooner/Let the black horses, spluttering fire, stamped ... Unless we can be ourselves - ourselves or more.'
Sailing Orders - white horses, amber lights - towards coral islands of first love; every ocean ends in port - And yet beliefs are still to make
Notes for a biography (I) - An oranges (sweet) and lemons (bitter) childhood; oh catnap-happy, catacomb-haunted childhood

[Liam Guilar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard to be objective about this one. "Cradle song for Eleanor" was one of the first poems I memorized, way back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, and the second verse remains a standard against which other poems can be sometimes measured, as does the brilliant opening line of 'Meeting Point'.
So the point of reading the collected is to read the longer poems especially the two Autumn Journals and see if they can possibly live up to the shorter ones, as well as investigating the standard critical line that in his middle years MacNeice "lost it"...

First and last verse of "Meeting point"

Time was away and somewhere else,
There were two glasses and two chairs
And two people with the one pulse
(Somebody stopped the moving stairs)
Time was away and somewhere else.
...

Time was away and she was here
And life no longer what it was,
The bell was silent in the air
And all the room one glow because
Time was away and she was here.
-- Louis MacNeice

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I could give a book, or at least a writer, 6 stars, I'd give them to Mr. MacNeice. Hell, I'd give him 10. He's definitely my favorite author in any form of literature.

[Elsbeth Kwant · Rating 2 out of 5]

I remember seeing Louis MacNeices Snow at Barter Books in Alnwick and being touched by the 'incorrigably plural'. A good reason to dip a bit deeper for the Sealey Challenge.


Turf-Stacks
Here is no mass-production of neat thoughts
No canvas shrouds for the mind

The Creditor



The quietude of a soft wind
Will not rescind
My debts to God, but gentle-skinned
His finger probes. I lull myself
In quiet in diet in riot in dreams,
In dopes in drams in drums in dreams
Till God retire and the door shut.
But
Now I am left in the fire-blaze
The peacefulness of the fire-blaze
Will not erase
My debts to God for His mind strays
Over and under and all ways
All days and always.

Sunday Morning
Down the road someone is practising scales,
The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails,
Man’s heart expands to tinker with his car
For this is Sunday morning, Fate’s
great bazaar;
Regard these means as ends, concentrate on this Now,
And you may grow to music or drive beyond Hindhead anyhow

Intimations of mortality
All is above board, order is restored,
Time on horseback under a Roman arch.

Snow



The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.


World is crazier and more of it than we
think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

An April Manifesto



Our April must replenish the delightful wells,
Bucket’s lip dipping, light on the sleeping cells,
Man from his vigil in the wintry chapel
Will card his skin with accurate strigil.
O frivolous and astringent spring
We never come full circle, never remember
Self behind self years without number,
A series of dwindling mirrors, but take a tangent line
And start again. Our April must replenish
Our bank-account of vanity and give our doors a coat of varnish


Wolves
The tide comes in and goes out again, I do not want
To be always stressing either its flux or its permanence
Come then all of you, come closer, form a circle,
Join hands and make believe that joined
Hands will keep away the wolves of water
Who howl along our coast.

August



The shutter of time darkening ceaselessly
Has whisked away the foam of may and elder
And I realise how now, as every year before,
Once again the gay months have eluded me.
(..)
Time’s face is not stone nor still his wings;
Our mind, being dead, wishes to have time die
For we, being ghosts, cannot catch hold of things

Museums



Museums offer us, running from among the buses,
A centrally heated refuge, parquet floors and sarcophaguses,
Into whose tall fake porches we hurry without a sound
Like a beetle under a brick that lies, useless, on the ground.
(..)
And then returns to the street, his mind an arena where sprawls
Any number of consumptive Keatses and dying Gauls.

[Timbo · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic collected poems in terms of breadth and scope. The reader can get a unique perspective on a poet's rise in technique and quality of subject, his subsequent loss of focus and long night of the soul, and eventual recapturing of vision and ability in later works. MacNeice, as represented here, becomes a great 20th century poet.

[James Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fine and crafted poems by one of Ireland's greatest poets. From Nelson watching his world collapse around a hungry door to the last embarkation of feckless men, this anthology collects his greatest writings. Absolutely brilliant poetry

[Yomaru Hananoshika · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very talented Ireland poet. A great thinker and great philosopher.

[Dawn With-whippet · Rating 1 out of 5]

not my cup of tea . a few odd lines in a few of the poems were beautifully written but not worth the effort of trawling through the rest

[Fionnbharr Rodgers · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Bible.

[Marc Cooper · Rating 3 out of 5]

From 16 August to 22 December, this has been a four month journey. And a bit of a slog (610 pages). The first 1/3 was by far the most interesting:

- Poems (1935)
- from: Out of the Picture (1937)
- from: Letters from Iceland (1937)
- The Earth Compels (1938)
- Autumn Journal (1939)

From here – almost half the book – until the final 1/6, there was little of interest and very little memorable. Coincidentally, this coincides with MacNeice joining the BBC.

- Plant and Phantom (1941)
- Springboard (1944)
- Holes in the Sky (1948)
- from: Collected Poems (1949)
- Ten Burnt Offerings (1952)
- Autumn Sequel (1954)
- Visitations (1957)

The final part (1/6) see him regain his voice:

- Solstices (1961)
- The Burning Perch (1963)

(There are an additional two hundred pages of appendices: poems from pre-university and undergraduate days, plus some others, a some textual notes.)

The early poems benefit from his early life experiences, WWII, and the breakdown of his marriage as source material. He's also experimenting with forms. Thereafter, he doesn't seem to develop much, and he becomes stuck in this Oxford classics world – a problem that recurs today with a certain element of society.

I was surprised at MacNeice's seeming inability to extend his interests, even to explore – a kind of absence of curiosity. The poems are mainly descriptions of what surrounds him and, frankly, not very poetic.

This is clearly a solid collection of MacNeice's poems, so five stars for that. In terms of quality and content, I found little of interest or particularly memorable; so two stars. Overall, three stars.

[Colin Flanigan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a man who wrote comic, tragic and melancholy verse. He wrote with rhyme and without it. One of his last poems...

"
Maybe we knew each other better
When the night was young and unrepeated
And the moon stood still over Jericho.

So much for the past; in the present
There are moments caught between heart-beats
When maybe we know each other better.

But what is that clinking in the darkness?
Maybe we shall know each other better
When the tunnels meet beneath the mountain."

One of his most famous ones. Bagpipe Music...

"It's no go the picture palace, it's no go the stadium,
It's no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums,
It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections,
Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.

It's no go my honey love, it's no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather.”

[Eduardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

The reviews of Macneice's intense lyrical and philosophical poetry are quite accurate, having read many of his poems but not the collected I was aware of this, as well as his being lumped in with the Auden Generation. He does dive into classical literature and his adept handling of both meter, poetic techniques, and the wide breath of knowledge that comes out of his poems is outstanding. It may be harder reading to modern readers as some of Macneice's longer poems are dense in the best sense of the word, a journey into some kind of classical forest. As a big fan of his Oxford friends Stephen Spender & W H Auden this was worth reading.

[Lorraine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Skimmed through this because I really have too much reading to do. Some of it is really beautiful -- some though -- on first read -- a little draggy -- excessively philosophical. But I might change my mind. I'm definitely going to re-read it when I'm more free.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn’t read every single word of this book, but what I did read was very impressive. I stumbled upon this poet in the prologue of a novel I never finished, but I am eternally grateful to that author for bringing macneice to my attention.

[Blakely · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Plurality" is possibly my favorite poem ever.

[Patricia Marquerite Addis Sarant]

I studied this amazing, sometimes quiet, sometimes angry, humble poet...makes me think of "working class hero" -Plastic Ono Band

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say? MacNeice is one of the most accomplished (and underappreciated) poets there is. It is a tragedy he's overlooked so much and so widely.

[M · Rating 5 out of 5]

This man is unbelievably beautiful. His poems are heavy in content but light and deft in form; it's as if Rilke was writing with Auden's pen. Wonderful; I'm incredibly happy I discovered him.

[deven]

prayer before birth -- http://aboutreading.blogspot.co.uk/20...

snow -- http://www.artofeurope.com/macneice/m...

[Steven Andersson]

Get the 2013 Wake Forest edition edited by Peter McDonald. MacNeice was a contemporary of Auden and Spender, and deserves wider reading. My Greek professor Peter Green introduced us to MacNeice with a lengthy recital by heart from Autumn Journal. MacNiece wrote of the ancient world:

The Glory that was Greece: put it in a syllabus, grade it
Page by page
To train the mind or even to point a moral
For the present age:
Models of logic and lucidity, dignity, sanity,
The golden mean between opposing ills
Though there were exceptions of course but only exceptions -
The bloody Bacchanals on the Thracian hills.
So the humanist in his room with Jacobean panels
Chewing his pipe and looking on a lazy quad
Chops the Ancient World to turn a sermon
To the greater glory of God.
But I can do nothing so useful or so simple;
These dead are dead
And when I think I should remember the paragons of Hellas
I think instead
Of the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists,
The careless athletes and the fancy boys,
The hair-splitters, the pedants, the hard-boiled sceptics
And the Agora, and the noise
Of the demagogues and the quacks; and the women pouring
Libations over graves
And the trimmers at Delphi and the dummies at Sparta, and lastly
I think of the slaves.
And how anyone can imagine oneself among them
I do not know;
It was all so unimaginably different
And all so long ago.

Comrade!