In the 1930s, Louis MacNeice showed tremendous promise both as a writer of original plays for the stage and, with The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1937), as a translator capable of giving new life to Greek tragedy; and, toward the end of his career, he returned to the theater with One for the Grave (1966). But for various reasons he did not develop as a stage dramatist, and it is for his poetry and his work, including plays, for radio that he is known.

Though MacNeice's poetry tended, for a time, to be overshadowed by the brilliant and more varied verse of his contemporary and friend W. H. Auden and to merge with that of the Auden group in the minds of readers, its quality and distinctiveness have come to be properly recognized. Autumn Journal (1939) is justly regarded not only as MacNeice's most important work but as one of the major...