The Ticking Fear

John Kerrigan: Louis MacNeice, 7 February 2008

Louis MacNeice: Collected Poems 
edited by Peter McDonald.
Faber, 836 pp., £30, January 2007, 978 0 571 21574 4
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Louis MacNeice: Selected Poems 
edited by Michael Longley.
Faber, 160 pp., £12.99, April 2007, 978 0 571 23381 6
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I Crossed the Minch 
by Louis MacNeice.
Polygon, 253 pp., £9.99, September 2007, 978 1 84697 014 6
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The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography 
by Louis MacNeice, edited by E.R. Dodds.
Faber, 288 pp., £9.99, September 2007, 978 0 571 23942 9
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... the slave-owner’s mind’) or is driven by his childhood sense of abandonment (‘Louis Malone’ was his early pseudonym, ‘Louis M. Alone’) to claim that England is ‘teeming with unwanted/Children who are so many, each is alone’. Yet the poem’s techniques of immediacy set limits to what it can say. Defending Auden, MacNeice wrote that ...