Louis MacNeice was born on September 12, 1907, in Belfast, Ireland. He attended Oxford, where he majored in classics and philosophy. In 1930, he married Giovanna Ezra and accepted a post as classics lecturer at the University of Birmingham, a position he held until 1936, when he went on to teach Greek at Bedford College for Women, University of London. In 1941, he joined the British Broadcasting Company as a staff writer and producer. Like many modern English poets, MacNeice found an audience for his work through British radio. Some of his best-known plays, including Christopher Columbus (1944), and The Dark Tower (1946), were originally written for radio and later published.

Although he chose to live the majority of his adult life in London, MacNeice frequently returned to the landscapes of his childhood, and he took great pride in his Irish heritage. His poetry is characterized by its familiar, sometimes humorous tone and its integration of contemporary ideas and images. In addition to his poetry and radio dramas, MacNeice also wrote the verse translation The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1936), translated Goethe's Faust (1951), and collaborated with Auden on the travelogue Letters from Iceland (1937).

In August of 1963, MacNeice, on location with a BBC team, insisted on going down into a mineshaft to check on sound effects. He caught a chill that was not diagnosed as pneumonia until he was fatally ill. He died on September 3, 1963, just before the publication of his last book of poems, The Burning Perch. He was 55 years old.

This second posthumous COLLECTED POEMS, entirely re-edited by Peter McDonald, attempts for the first time to print MacNeice's poetry in groupings corresponding closely to the collections published by Faber between 1935 and 1963. The texts of the poems in the new edition are based on a comparison of all printed versions, as revised in the light of the poet's later thoughts. This has resulted in a large number of changes. It is hoped that the present edition presents MacNeice's poetry more accurately, as well as more fully, than all previous collections.

This new edition also includes, as appendices, "The Last Ditch" - the short book of poems which MacNeice published with the Cuala Press in 1940 - and "The Revenant", a cycle of songs written for MacNeice's wife, the singer Hedli Anderson, a selection of uncollected early poems, and from "Blind Fireworks", MacNeice's first published book of verse.