“Re-Collecting MacNiece”: Maria Johnston on the new Faber Edition of Louis MacNeice’s Collected Poems
by Ernie on 16/10/07 at 3:38 pm
In the new issue of the Contemporary Poetry Review, Maria Johnston reviews the new collected poems of Louis MacNeice:
In a note on Louis MacNeice’s poetry penned in 1964, Louise Bogan observed that, “the Collected Poems 1925-1948 should, although not so arranged, be read in chronological order, for it is an added pleasure to watch the opening out of a true lyric gift, and of one so clearly illustrative of the subtle shifts and adjustments that have occurred within English poetic tradition during this century.” Bogan would doubtless have welcomed this magnificent new edition of MacNeice’s Collected Poems edited by Peter McDonald, replacing E.R. Dodds’ 1979 edition, which has restored the chronology of the individual collections in order of publication while also studiously taking account of MacNeice’s revisions. It contains too a number of valuable appendices which include helpful textual notes along with MacNeice’s notes to his individual collections and many previously uncollected poems of varying quality—including those that MacNeice omitted when revising collections during his lifetime.
Throughout, the range and expansiveness of the poetry of this most prolific poet is on display, even if, as Philip Larkin said of MacNiece’s 1957 collection Visitations, some of it is “strictly for the fans.” One of the most important inclusions is MacNeice’s 1940 volume The Last Ditch which he dedicated to the American writer Eleanor Clark, published by Yeats’s Cuala Press in 1940, and which represents, as McDonald astutely asserts in his introduction, “an important moment in the poet’s publishing history.” MacNeice’s identity as a so-called “thirties poet” has been well documented, but The Last Ditch comes at a crucial time in his career, marking the end of the thirties phase and opening into his American experience of 1939 and 1940. Born in Belfast in 1907 to parents who had roots in the West of Ireland, then schooled from an early age in England where he lived most of his life, MacNeice is always viewed by critics in terms of either his Irishness, his Englishness or his Anglo-Irishness, but his autobiographical narrative The Strings are False begins with his symbolic crossing from America to Europe in late 1940, “on a boat going back to a war,” thus making for a larger and more complex reality. MacNeice’s American experience is a defining transitional moment, central to the trajectory of his career.
To read the rest of Maria Johnston’s review, click here.
