Derek Mahon
SPICE OF LIFE
Collected Poems
By Louis MacNeice (Faber & Faber 836pp £30)

It was Philip Larkin who said, in an obituary notice, that MacNeice could have written the words of 'These Foolish Things'. To many people he's still a poet of London and New York in the 1930s, worldly, suave and ironical. His poetry of the time was a cinematic one of city lights and cocktail bars, his philosophy an aesthetic of shining surfaces, 'the sunlight on the garden', 'the dazzle on the sea'. The Irish light in his head was a metaphor for the variety of human experience and personality. His pleasure in things became, in his social poetry, a pleasure in people. His work enacted a struggle between darkness and light. The darkness derived from a psychiatric disorder in his mother which proved incurable; from a sheltered childhood in 'darkest Ulster', and an ambiguous fear of solitude: at school in England his fellows 'could never breathe my darkness'. The light, by contrast, was prismatic. Variety being the spice of life, he set himself to champion variety and oppose homogeneity; his poetic joie de vivre had its source in a breaking wave.

His vivid apprehension of the physical world marks him out from his English contemporaries, whose effects are generally more abstract. One thinks of Auden's theoretical cast of mind, Spender's idealism, C Day Lewis's rhetoric. MacNeice too was no slouch at these things: an Oxford graduate in Greats, he knew his way around academic philosophy. He makes frequent fun of the subject, but there is a strong philosophical undertow in even (or especially) his most sparkling work. Versed in the smoke and mirrors, he used real smoke and mirrors as erotic props. A fetishist of 'Bijoux and long-eared dogs and silken legs', of limousine and crêpe-de-chine, scent-spray and 'milk-white telephone', he embraced the prescribed glamour - though that was less than half the story.

This new, centenary Collected Poems, replacing E R Dodds' 1979 edition, is both more expansive and easier to negotiate. Peter McDonald adopts the time-honoured expedient of printing individual volumes in order of publication - though that's not all there is to it. The formative Blind Fireworks (1929), largely a product of MacNeice's Oxford years, appears as one of several Appendices and the book proper kicks off with the more mature and trenchant Poems (1935): 'An Eclogue for Christmas', 'Train to Dublin', 'Snow', 'Mayfly'. Revisiting the twenty years of his first maturity (1929-1949) - grave meditations like Autumn Journal, 'London Rain', 'Prayer before Birth', 'The Casualty'; happy jingles like 'Letter to Graham and Anna' and 'Bagpipe Music' - you are struck by what a vigorous, glittering talent he had then, how versatile and inclusive he could be. See 'Auden and MacNeice: Their Last Will and Testament' (from Letters from Iceland), included here, and the tremendous five-page 'Life of Lord Leverhulme': All that remained of Lever's plans Were some half-built piers and some empty cans, And the islanders with no regrets Treated each other to cigarettes.

The often close connection between poetic energy and the larger political drama was strong in MacNeice, who, while resisting political commitment, famously said, '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...' Highly appreciative of women, he was usually (if not always happily) in love, a condition conducive to poetry but also a consolation and resource against the frightfulness of the public sphere. Like his poetic contemporaries he was lucky to flourish in the 1930s and 1940s, hugely 'interesting times' as in the Chinese curse; for him too it was his finest hour, the moment when it all came together, even as it seemed to be blowing apart: apocalyptic nightmare, humane despair, erotic intensity and romantic hope. His poems of that time, the love-life bubbling away while the bombs began to fall, have clarity, assurance and a raw consciousness of the historical moment. War and separation: he gets over a failed American love affair (Eleanor Clark); his friend Graham Shepard is lost at sea; he marries a second time (Hedli Anderson) and publishes Springboard (1944), a high-wire volume dizzy and Dionysian: O delicate walker, babbler, dialectician Fire, O enemy and image of ourselves, Did we not on those mornings after the All Clear, When you were looting shops in elemental joy And singing as you swarmed up city block and spire, Echo your thought in ours? 'Destroy! Destroy!'

He never wrote like that again. The poet Harry Clifton puts it like this: 'The war passed, and with it the world-historical dimension, the depth of field behind the love poems of the previous decade.' Postwar Britain offered exhaustion, not exhilaration, and all the poetry shrank. It was time for irony and pop music.

The Appendices bring together much scattered and previously uncollected material, and even this is only a selection. MacNeice was vastly prolific: Barbara Coulton, in Louis MacNeice in the BBC (1980), lists over a hundred radio features, not to speak of the plays and other prose works. As for the poems, he published far too many for his own good. Out of the Picture (1937) can have added nothing to his early appeal, nor Ten Burnt Offerings (1952) to his later reputation. The 120-page Autumn Sequel (1954) was judged, perhaps unfairly, a tedious failure, and the later volumes contain too many pieces with titles like 'Indoor Sports' and 'Country Week-End'. 'This middle stretch of life is bad for poets', he wrote in 'Day of Renewal', though he picked up towards the end; some years before the end, in fact. Visitations (1957) and Solstices (1961), in contrast to the jazzy prewar volumes and the spectacular wartime ones, are quiet, undemanding and gloomily introspective, as if conscious of diminished expectation, 'youth and poetry departed', but they face up to disenchantment and 'failure' with touching honesty. After the Age of Anxiety the anxiety of age. These two volumes represent, in their own modest fashion, a striking contribution to the literature of the climacteric. Still in his forties and fifties, he was writing like a grumpy old man: When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards And reading and even speaking have been replaced By other less difficult media, we wonder if you Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste...

Among the Appendices is a series of MacNeice's 'prefaces and introductions' to his own work. Writing about his last volume, The Burning Perch (1963), he notes that 'fear and resentment seem here to be serving me in the same way as Yeats in his old age claimed to have been served by "lust and rage"'. Like many another, he disliked the new pop culture, the beginnings of the postmodern world, its raucous self-regard satirised and deplored in 'Budgie' ('The mirror jerks in the weightless cage') and 'Memoranda to Horace'. His last work is a withdrawal ('To opt out now seems better than capitulate'), an admission of his defeat by 'the too well-lighted and over-advertised / idols of the age'; but he managed the final stretch better than Auden. Were the issue not muddied by the usual Anglo-Irish claims and counter-claims, he might even now be recognised as ultimately the more interesting poet, indeed one of the most interesting poets of the twentieth century. Peter McDonald's splendid new edition should put his standing beyond question.