Louis MacNeice's "Collected Poems" - NYTimes.com Major poets, like trick-or-treaters, tend to arrive in pairs or small groups (whether this is a matter of fate or academic convenience may be debated). And yet from roughly 1930 to 1950, British and Irish poetry seemed to fall under the sway of a single writer: W. H. Auden. Auden was hardly a solitary figure, of course - his compatriots included Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis (father of Daniel), and the four writers were once thought to be so intimately related that the poet Roy Campbell referred to them as "MacSpaunday." But it wasn't a relationship of equals: the MacSpaunday poets were usually considered notable not because of how closely they resembled one another, but because of how much the other three looked like Auden. That has begun to change for Louis MacNeice, whose reputation has been steadily rising for 20 years in Britain and Ireland, in part because of vigorous support from Irish writers like Edna Longley, Paul Muldoon and Derek Mahon. MacNeice's "Collected Poems" has finally been published in the United States, where readers will now have a chance to approach this under­estimated writer on his own terms. MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907, the son of a schoolteacher inclined to melancholy and an Anglican clergyman who was himself not brimming with joie de vivre. "I could hear his voice below in the study," MacNeice writes of a boyhood memory of his father, "intoning away, communing with God." Shortly thereafter, the family moved to the ancient town of Carrickfergus, where MacNeice's mother descended into a depression that resulted in a scene straight out of a childhood nightmare. "My mother became steadily more ill," MacNeice says in his memoir, "and at last she went away; the last I can remember of her at home was her walking up and down the bottom path of the garden . . . talking to my sister and weeping." She would die in a nursing home within the year. MacNeice was 6. Though he would go on to distinguish himself at Oxford, meet and befriend many of the great literary figures of his day and travel the world as a writer for the BBC and a widely recognized poet, there is always a sense that the isolated boy described in the conclusion to "Autobiography" has a hand on the pen of the grown-up MacNeice: When I woke they did not care; Nobody, nobody was there. Come back early or never come. When my silent terror cried, Nobody, nobody replied. He is one of the 20th century's great poets of loneliness. And yet this aspect of MacNeice can be easy to overlook, in part because he seems (as is frequently said of Auden) entirely comfortable with the rhythms and clutter of the modern world: "Cubical scent-bottles artificial legs arctic foxes and electric mops." We think of solitary poets as writing about ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas; we don't usually think of them as being interested in "electric mops." Nor do we think of them as being fluent. Yet MacNeice is effortlessly, almost ridiculously articulate - he seems capable (again like Auden) of writing about nearly anything, and in nearly any form. The 800 or so pages here include tiny poems (the nine-line "Upon This Beach"); book-length poems ("Autumn Journal," which helped make his reputation); book-length poems in terza rima ("Autumn Sequel," which nearly undid it); virtuoso deployment of nearly all forms of rhyme ("London Rain" rhymes a word with itself in every stanza); and a vocabulary that suavely extends from "Tom or Dick or Harry" and "trams" to "ochred" and ­"archaize." Surely a poet of loneliness should do a little more stammering. Or should he? The difference between loneliness and mere solitariness, after all, is that the lonely sensibility wants to be otherwise. There is a reaching out that never quite touches. In MacNeice's best work, the ingeniousness and inevitable failure of that reaching indicates the depth of the longing. He is a superb love poet, for instance, yet his love poems often foreground their own ephemerality, like ice sculptures in the summertime. Consider "Meeting Point," which is about the fiction writer Eleanor Clark, one of MacNeice's many, many paramours. Here is how the poem begins: 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. After six more stanzas of Cole Porter-ish elegance, the poem ends: 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. Of course, time is never "away"; it is by nature constantly present. The poem is about the illusion of permanent connection in passing happiness, but it is no less lovely for that. And that loveliness is in part a function of repetition and refrain, two overlapping tactics MacNeice used for opposed purposes throughout his career. Warmer poems like "Meeting Point" or "The Sunlight on the Garden" provide a formal symbol for continuity or synthesis: they are the hopeful side of loneliness. But in many other poems the act of repeating is an indication of futility. Consider "Reflections," which opens with a scene of tripled repetition: The mirror above my fireplace reflects the reflected Room in my window; I look in the mirror at night And see two rooms, the first where left is right And the second, beyond the reflected window, corrected But there I am standing back to my back. The reflections multiply and extend in an astounding display of technical wizardry until the very act of writing becomes impossible: I can see beyond and through the reflections the street lamps At home outdoors where my indoors rooms lie stranded, Where a taxi perhaps will drive in through the bookcase Whose books are not for reading and past the fire Which gives no warmth and pull up by my desk At which I cannot write since I am not lefthanded. In the brilliantly frightening poems of MacNeice's last collection, the repetitions that give shape to his loneliness begin to take on the black outlines of despair: lovers introduced in a "grave glade" find themselves in a "green grave"; childlike refrains like "tra-la" and "Touch me not forget me not" indicate horror, not whimsy. But perhaps the most striking use of repetition occurs in his final 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. What we most want, MacNeice suggests, is simply to "know each other better," but that possibility depends on laboring blindly through darkness. With the publication of "Collected Poems," MacNeice's own excavation is now complete; readers who meet him halfway will find a passage that opens and opens and opens. David Orr writes the On Poetry column for the Book Review.