He is forever a “young writer of the Thirties,” the fourth poet of depression and dictatorship—the last mentioned, the second best, the most humanly appealing. As that dogmatic decade came to a close, Auden galloped off to America, Spender began his long plush plod into a half-century afterlife, and Day Lewis the retreat from millennial Marxist to murmuring Laureate. Louis MacNeice, too honest all along to have anything to recant, just stayed alert, keeping his cold but appreciative eyes peeled. Now, more than thirty years after the poet’s death, Jon Stallworthy, previously the author of Wilfred Owen, has built a sturdy, unstylish biography, overlong by about the same proportion as MacNeice’s life (1907–1963) was too short.

As poets go, he had about the right amount of outsiderliness: he was an Irishman operating in England, a Protestant back home. His missionary grandfather had been driven off Omey island in the west by a Catholic mob; his father, the rector of Carrickfergus, angered his Protestant parishioners by being a Home Ruler. MacNeice’s own young life was shadowed by a brother’s Down’s syndrome as well as his mother’s depression and premature death, events that Stallworthy works rather hard in a bygone Freudian way. He feels compelled, for example, to italicize the phrase “cubs that have lost their mother,” when explicating a poem from 1945 called “Last before America.” More worthy of emphasis is the fact that MacNeice actually enjoyed his years as a public