Books by Louis MacNeice

This highly amusing and unorthodox travel book resulted from a light-hearted summer journey by the young poets Auden and MacNeice in 1936. from Auden's 'Letter to Lord Byron' and MacNeice's 'Eclogue', to the mischief and fun of their joint 'Last Will and Testament', the book is impossible to resist - a 1930s classic.

'I go the zoo half because I like looking at the animals and half because I like looking at the people... The pleasure of dappled things, the beauty of adaptation to purpose, the glory of extravagance, classic elegance or romantic nonsense and grotesquerie - all these we get from the Zoo.' In 1938 Louis MacNeice published his second collection of poems with Faber; his 'personal essay' Modern Poetry for OUP; and Zoo, a prose commission from Michael Joseph to write an impressionistic 'guide' to the London Zoo in Regents Park. Envisioned as a breezy assignment MacNeice's Zoo inevitably became a richer endeavour, taking in side-trips to Paris and Belfast. Zoo also benefited from illustrations by the painter Nancy Sharp, with whom MacNeice had begun an affair after moving to London in 1936.This Faber Finds edition returns to circulation a delightful rarity by one of the twentieth century's most brilliant poets.

Commissioned by the BBC for the Goethe Centenary in 1949, and originally broadcast in six instalments, Louis MacNeice's translation of Goethe's Faust distills the digressive dimensions of the original - at once a play and an epic poem - into a verse drama for the ear.

Louis MacNeice read classics at Oxford, and his professional life began as a lecturer in classics, before his career developed as a poet and broadcaster. For many readers of Greek, Aeschylus is revealed as a great poet and dramatist of contemporary importance'.

Discusses the significance of 'parable' for the times in which the author lived, and implicitly for his own poetic. This book offers a statement about poetry and poetics.

Discloses W B Yeat's critical mind, which was always discontented with its own formulations, full of self-questionings and questionings of others, scrupling to admire, reluctant to be won.

A radio parable play, written in response to the rise of fascism in Germany and the events of World War II. It stages the debate about free will with reference to the ancient theme of the Quest, but in modern contexts exploring sexuality, gender, family and geography.

Written between August and December 1938, Autumn Journal is still considered one of the most valuable and moving testaments of living through the thirties by a young writer. It is a record of the author's emotional and intellectual experience during those months, the trivia of everyday living set against the events of the world outside, the settlement in Munich and slow defeat in Spain.

'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, susceptible to physical impressions.'Louis MacNeice's prescription is designed to look ordinary, rather than esoteric, but very little poetry can claim to meet these specifications, stringent in their very wideness. MacNeice's work matches the world he famously described as 'incorrigibly plural.'Michael Longley, himself a distinguished Ulster poet, has written an introductory essay of meticulous advocacy. His wife, the critic Edna Longley, has supplied the apparatus for students and the general reader.

Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907 and educated at Marlborough and Merton College, Oxford. For most of his working life he was a writer and producer for BBC radio. His death in 1963 was sudden and unexpected.

This volume contains eight of Louis MacNeice's best plays, most of which were written for BBC Radio. It draws on the most authoritative texts. Alan Heuser is the editor of "Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice" and "Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice".

This volume covers the sweep of Louis MacNeice's interests outside the literary, thus conveying the visual perceptiveness, humour, seriousness and enthusiasm of his personality and poetry.

Faber are pleased to announce the relaunch of the poetry list - starting in Spring 2001 and continuing, with publication dates each month, for the rest of the year. This will involve a new jacket design recalling the typographic virtues of the classic Faber poetry covers, connecting the backlist and the new titles within a single embracing cover solution. A major reissue program is scheduled, to include classic individual collections from each decade, some of which have long been unavailable: Wallace Stevens's Harmonium and Ezra Pound's Personae from the 1920s; W.H. Auden's Poems (1930); Robert Lowell's Life Studies from the 1950s; John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs and Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings from the 1960s; Ted Hughes's Gaudete and Seamus Heaney's Field Work from the 1970s; Michael Hofmann's Acrimony and Douglas Dunn's Elegies from the 1980s. Timed to celebrate publication of Seamus Heaney's new collection, Electric Light, the relaunch is intended to re-emphasize the predominance of Faber Poetry, and to celebrate a series which has played a shaping role in the history of modern poetry since its inception in the 1920s.