Louis MacNeice
Selected Poems, edited by Michael Longley.
Faber & Faber, 240 pages, £12.99

Just as Ernest Dowson, Oscar Wilde, Lionel Johnson, and the
young W. B. Yeats were known in their day as “poets of the
Nineties,” Louis MacNeice, W. H. Auden, C. Day-Lewis, and
Stephen Spender are known as “poets of the Thirties.” What
opium, thwarted love, and alcohol were to the Decadents,
Marxism, rejection of the old order, and alcohol were to the
young poets of the 1930s, arguably the most volatile decade
of a volatile century. Auden is the most remembered and
revered of this group. Yet MacNeice, who published his own take
on some of the same events Auden bore witness to, seems in
retrospect saner and more prescient. His
centenary last year was celebrated with a certain amount of
fanfare in his native Ireland and in his adopted home,
England. Faber has recently issued a paperback Selected
Poems, nicely chosen by the Northern Irish poet Michael
Longley.

Auden has been roundly—and justifiably, in my
view—criticized for the naïveté of his political views
reflected even in a poem as brilliant as “Spain 1937,” with
its dramatic contrasts between a moribund past and an
imagined future:

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,

The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;

To-day the expending of powers

On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,