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.

In the summer of 1936, W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice visited Iceland on commission to write a travel book, but found themselves capturing concerns on a scale that were far more international. 'Though writing in a "holiday" spirit,' commented Auden, 'its authors were all the time conscious of a threatening horizon to their picnic - world-wide unemployment, Hitler growing everyday more powerful and a world-war more inevitable.' The result is the remarkable Letters from Iceland, a collaboration in poetry and prose, reportage and correspondence, published in 1937 with the Spanish Civil War newly in progress, beneath the shadow of looming world war.

"'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.

Born in Ireland, Louis MacNeice was sent to England for his schooling, to Marlborough, and then went on to read classics at Oxford. His professional life began as a lecturer in classics but in 1941 he joined the BBC and for the next twenty years produced programmes for the legendary Features Department, including his own celebrated radio play, The Dark Tower, which was broadcast for the first time in 1946, with original music by Benjamin Britten.

Described by the author as 'a radio parable play', written in response to the rise of fascism in Germany and the events of World War II, The Dark Tower stages the debate about free will with reference to the ancient theme of the Quest, but in modern contexts exporing sexuality, gender, family and geography.

"'"The Dark Tower is in my view the best piece of writing ever done for radio.' George MacBeth

The poet Louis MacNeice's pioneering critical study of W. B. Yeats was undertaken in 1939, shortly after the death of Yeats, and published early in 1941, in time of war - as an attempt to disentangle MacNeice's own feelings about the elder poetic statesman and compatriot, but also to investigate the reality of poetry at a historical moment when its uses seemed most tenuous.

As Richard Ellmann remarked: 'MacNeice's book on Yeats is still as good an introduction to that poet as we have, with the added interest that it is also an introduction to MacNeice. It discloses a critical mind always discontented with its own formulations, full of self-questionings and questionings of others, scrupling to admire, reluctant to be won. Yet mistrust of Yeats is overcome by wary approval, in a rising tone of endorsement'.

MacNeice's study succeeded in delineating those aspects of Yeats that remain central to discussion of the poet today.

In Varieties of Parable, which comprises the Clark Lectures given by Louis MacNeice at Cambridge in 1963, a few months before his death, the poet discusses the significance of 'parable' for the times in which he lived, and implictly for his own poetic. The discussion ranges widely, including Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and William Golding (new writers with whom MacNeice felt an obvious kinship), and backwards genealogically to Spenser's The Faerie Queene or Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, by way of Alice in Wonderland and the fantasy tales of George MacDonald - as well as outwards into the exemplary European fictional world of Kafka. Most importantly, MacNeice ponders the uses of parable for poetry, and Varieties of Parable stands as an implict handbook to the landscapes and 'thumbnail nightmares' of his own later verse, whose new horizons were abruptly foreshortened by the poet's untimely death in autumn 1963. Varieties of Parable stands as MacNeice's last considered statement about poetry and poetics, and one of his most atmospheric and personal acts of literary criticism.

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. Published in 1936 and intended primarily for the stage, MacNeice's version of The Agamemnon was immediately recognised, in the words of T. S. Eliot, as 'an accurate, almost literal translation, and at the same time as English poetry for the twentieth century. For many readers of Greek, Aeschylus is revealed as a great poet and dramatist of contemporary importance'.

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. The translation is almost line for line, following closely and skilfully the varied verse patterns of the original, as well as its radical shifts of mood and momentum. Louis MacNeice joined the BBC in 1941, and for the next twenty years produced programmes for the legendary Features Department, as well as composing a very individual body of work for radio. He wrote in praise of the 'calculated speech' of the radio as a medium, 'divorced from all visual supports or interferences'. His Goethe's Faust remains the most successful adaptation of Goethe's masterpiece for an English audience, but is also an important and neglected contribution to MacNeice's own poetic oeuvre for radio.

'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.

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.

Louis MacNeice is increasingly recognised as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and his work has been a defining influence upon a generation of Irish poets that includes Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon. The Selected Letters is indispensable as a resource for an understanding of the intellectual culture of the mid-twentieth century. A Classics don, poet, playwright and globetrotting BBC producer, the medley and blend of MacNeice's cultural influences seems exemplary in its modernity. He kept up a significant correspondence with E. R. Dodds, Anthony Blunt and T. S. Eliot, to name but three prominent figures of the time. During his time at the BBC MacNeice witnessed many key events, including the partition of India in 1947 and the independence of the Gold Coast from Britain in 1957, and these are recorded in two long sequences to his wife, the singer Hedli Anderson. His complex relationship to Ireland and to his Irish heritages speak resonantly to contemporary debates about Irish and Northern Irish cultural identity. Finally, the Letters will do much to broaden our understanding of a vivid and often enigmatic personality whose varied life and individual charisma have often resisted explanation.

Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) is rightly regarded as one of the foremost Irish poets of this century, but he was also a distinctive, gifted, and popular playwright. This unique selection of eight of MacNeice's best-known plays, most of which were written for BBC Radio, draws on the most authoritative texts to provide a much-needed reminder of the power of his dramatic writing. All the plays are published here in authentic versions for the first time, several considerably changed, and two entirely new plays, never before published. The volume comprises MacNeice's famous The Dark Tower, published here for the first time in its third and final version; the saga play They Met on Good Friday and the parable The Mad Islands, both of which use explicitly Irish subject-matter; the stage play One for the Grave, which mercilessly satirizes television and commercialism; the epic Christopher Columbus; He Had a Date (in its second version), an experiment in radio biography; Prisoner's Progress, a prize-winning parable about an escape from a prisoner-of-war camp; and MacNeice's last play, Persons from Porlock, which traces the nemesis of an artist and was broadcast just four days before MacNeice's own death. This generous and representative selection makes available again MacNeice's entertaining and innovative Irish blend of fantasy and realism, prose and verse, and offers important new perspectives on MacNeice's poetry.

This is the second of two collections of MacNeice's prose writings, prepared by Alan Heuser. The first, concentrating on his literary criticism, came out in 1987 (still available from OUP). The present collection will be of interest to a wider readership, since it covers the sweep of MacNeice's many ardently-pursued interests outside the strictly literary: philosophy and travel, history, autobiography, Ireland (the country of his birth, and one of the mainsprings of his writing of both prose and poetry), India, Greece - and rugby football. The volume also contains the `London letters', written during the Blitz; and a previously unpublished piece: Northern Ireland and her People. These writings convey the visual perceptiveness, humour, seriousness, and enthusiasm of MacNeice's personality and poetry: they are more than simply reflections of the decades in which they were written (from the thirties to the early sixties), revealing MacNeice's particular gifts as a writer, and throwing light on his personality and preoccupations. The complete bibliography of the shorter prose, included in Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice, is repeated here; and there is annotation and an index. This title also appears in the Oxford General Books catalogue for Autumn 1990.

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.

Four short plays for young actors

Making Scenes 3 is an exciting selection of plays commissioned by the Royal National Theatre for the BT National Connections festival for young actors in 1995.
Indian Summer by Harwant Bains; Kulwant returns to India and becomes fascinated with an ice-cream seller and the Holy Man who has sat for years with a sword through his mouth. When Kulwant pulls out the sword and offers the man a tutti-frutti ice-cream, a remarkable friendship is established.
Almost Grown by Richard Cameron; set in Yorkshire this is the story of how a tragic accident has affected the lives of three friends.
The Ice Palace by Lucinda Coxon; in this magical rites of passage tale Siss and Unn are best friends at school, but when Siss goes to visit her one day they set out on an adventure into a magnificent frozen waterfall from which Unn will never return.
The Dark Tower by Louis MacNeice; Roland must follow his ancestors' and brothers' footsteps on a journey through time, by ship across the sea of doubt, past ghost towns of history and through 'deserts of dried-up hopes', until he reaches the Dark Tower.

Each play includes Production Notes, dealing with setting and staging, costume, lighting and casting. Also included are a set of questions and exercises for workshop classes.