Poetry Books by Louis Macneice
Publisher: Birlinn Publishers
Published Date: 2007
Categories: Hebrides (Scotland)
In 1937, Louis MacNeice and his friend Nancy visited the Hebrides. Following loosely in the footsteps of Johnson and Boswell, MacNeice describes with distinctive candor the people, customs and landscapes of the Hebrides. Alienated from the way of life he encountered in the islands yet utterly fascinated by it, MacNeice provides a unique insight into a now vanished culture and, as such, creates a fascinating social historical document of Scottish rural life in the late 1930s.
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Published Date: 2008
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The poet Louis MacNeice's pioneering critical study of W. B. Yeats was undertaken in 1939, shortly after the death of Yeats, and published early in 1941, in time of war - as an attempt to disentangle MacNeice's own feelings about the elder poetic statesman and compatriot, but also to investigate the reality of poetry at a historical moment when its uses seemed most tenuous. As Richard Ellmann remarked: 'MacNeice's book on Yeats is still as good an introduction to that poet as we have, with the added interest that it is also an introduction to MacNeice. It discloses a critical mind always discontented with its own formulations, full of self-questionings and questionings of others, scrupling to admire, reluctant to be won. Yet mistrust of Yeats is overcome by wary approval, in a rising tone of endorsement'. MacNeice's study succeeded in delineating those aspects of Yeats that remain central to discussion of the poet today.
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published Date: 2015-02-05
Categories: Poetry
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.
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published Date: 2013-03-21
Categories: Science
'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 essay' Modern 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 MacNeice's 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 century's most brilliant poets.
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Published Date: 1954
Categories: Coinage
Story of the hunt for Penny who rolled off the mantle.
Publisher: Doubleday Books
Published Date: 1964
Categories: Philosophy
Provides a balanced treatment of the subject discussing its sometimes disreputable history, its disciples and critics as well as astrological predictions
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published Date: 2015-02-05
Categories: Literary Criticism
'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.
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published Date: 2008-05
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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'.
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Published Date: 2007-01-01
Categories: Biography & Autobiography
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.
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published Date: 1987-05-21
Categories: Literary Criticism
Although the poetry of Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) has long been available in collected editions, this is the first volume to bring together a selection of his equally accomplished literary criticism. Drawn from reviews, articles, drama criticism, and other publications, these fifty-six selections strike a balance between his earliest and his most mature work and canvas the full range of his interests, from classical writers to his own contemporaries, with essays on such prominent personal friends as W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas. The volume also contains an introduction, notes, and a full bibliography of MacNeice's short prose (not limited to his literary criticism).
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Published Date: 2001
Categories: English poetry
In this series, a contemporary poet advocates a poet of the past or present whom they have particularly admired. By their selection of verses and by the personal and critical reactions they express, the selectors offer intriguing insight into their own work.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published Date: 1990
Categories: Literary Criticism
Louis MacNeice is now recognized as the outstanding Irish poet between Yeats and Heaney. This volume is the second of two selections from the hitherto uncollected prose.
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Published Date: 2012-07-07
Categories: Fiction
Devlin Urquhart , an Oxford student disillusioned with his privileged past and the aesthetic life, heads for Yorkshire and a simpler identity as a gardner. He is employed by a well-connected Colonel in this capacity. But one's past does not lie down quietly, and everywhere Devlin roams, the tendrils of his former life reach out to him. Meanwhile the spirited youngest daughter of an eminent London psychologist rebels against her father's bombastic behaviour by throwing a treasured family heirloom against an antique mirror, shattering both the mirror and her father's complacency. They both go on to play a bizarre role in Devlin's fate. This picaresque, comic novel wittily satirises the social mores and youthful idealism that prevailed in London and the Home Counties between the wars, and will be a treat for the considerable number of MacNeice devotees across the Anglophone world.
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
Published Date: 1993
Categories: Drama
The volume comprises MacNeice's famous The Dark Tower, published here for the first time in its third and final version; the saga play They Met on Good Friday and the parable The Mad Islands, both of which use explicitly Irish subject-matter; the stage play One for the Grave, which mercilessly satirizes television and commercialism; the epic Christopher Columbus; He Had a Date (in its second version), an experiment in radio biography; Prisoner's Progress, a prize-winning parable about an escape from a prisoner-of-war camp; and MacNeice's last play, Persons from Porlock, which traces the nemesis of an artist and was broadcast just four days before MacNeice's own death.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published Date: 2013-06-27
Categories: History
This volume presents 11 radio scripts written and produced by Louis MacNeice over the span of his career at the BBC. This selection, all but one of which is published for the first time, illustrates the various ways that MacNeice re-worked ancient Greek and Roman history and literature for radio broadcast.
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Published Date: 2018-11-15
Categories: Iceland
In the summer of 1936, W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice visited Iceland on commission to write a travel book, but found themselves capturing concerns on a scale that were far more international. 'Though writing in a "holiday" spirit,' commented Auden, 'its authors were all the time conscious of a threatening horizon to their picnic - world-wide unemployment, Hitler growing everyday more powerful and a world-war more inevitable.' The result is the remarkable Letters from Iceland, a collaboration in poetry and prose, reportage and correspondence, published in 1937 with the Spanish Civil War newly in progress, beneath the shadow of looming world war.
