Collected Poems: Louis MacNeice Edited by Peter McDonald Faber £30 400pp

THIS new Collected Poems, to mark Louis MacNeice's centenary, is a substantial book. Peter McDonald, an academic and a poet himself, balances scholarly precision with reader-friendliness. It is a fine job. Individual collections are restored, beginning with MacNeice's first mature volume, Poems (1935). His debut, Blind Fireworks (1929), and uncollected poems are located in appendices. For many poets, slim volumes are merely instalments of the terminal book, but it is illuminating to find poems in their first context.

MacNeice is known as a writer of the historical moment. He is - along with Auden, Spender and Day Lewis - still considered a poet of the 1930s, that "dishonest decade" when war was just over the horizon. Despite this, he never quite belonged. The son of an Irish clergyman, MacNeice was always a little to one side, poetically and socially.

MacNeice liked his drink, but never took things as far as his friend Dylan Thomas. If he had, he might not have been so prolific. "I am writing a new kind of poem, " he says in a letter of 1939. "There are going to be 50 of them." The previous year, he had published four books and, even in 1963, the year of his death, he completed his last three works. He wrote in every genre, producing radio scripts during his time at the BBC.

"My trouble all my life, " he told his second wife, "has been overproduction." At his busiest, MacNeice published a new volume of poems every year or two.

In 1934, having twice had the manuscript of his second book rejected by TS Eliot, the poetry editor at Faber, MacNeice obliged the older poet by producing what was required: the longish poems which begin the book. The first, 'An Eclogue for Christmas', came complete with a strenuous modernity and a whiff of The Waste Land:

"I who was Harlequin in the childhood of the century." Other lines in poems smack of Auden, whose poetry had been taken on by the same firm five years earlier:

"Thousands of posters asserting a monopoly of the good, the beautiful, the true."

But there are also poems in which MacNeice is unmistakably his own man: the mysterious, painterly 'Snow' and the suburban snapshot of 'Sunday Morning'.

Thereafter, MacNeice managed with missionary zeal to incorporate into his writing the textures of the workday world.

Autumn Journal (1939), MacNeice's finest long poem, is a detailed account of the latter half of 1938;

episodes in London, Barcelona and at the Oxford by-election powerfully capture the atmosphere of looming war. But it also locked MacNeice into the period, and the label of '30s poet has stuck, unfairly, ever since.

Two years on, Plant and Phantom shows early signs of staleness.

Good poems are still in evidence, 'Meeting Point' the best known, but elsewhere the writing is on automatic pilot. Auden (in the selection he made of MacNeice's verse soon after his death), Peter McDonald and even the blurb for this Collected Poems acknowledge the dip in quality. Auden chose nothing either from the unpromisingly named Ten Burnt Offerings (1952) or Autumn Sequel (1954). The poetry is lifeless and the pathos of a writer blatantly revisiting an earlier success is uncomfortable.

How aware was MacNeice of his creative decline? Keenly, it seems.

In later books, he drops metaphor to confront the situation head on:

"Do I prefer to forget it? This middle stretch/ Of life is bad for poets" - though he is as likely to blame bad notices on the fact that his friends no longer write reviews, "which have consequently fallen into the hands of younger and as yet less successful writers (who also, I think, tend to be jealous of me. . . )."

But, in his final years, MacNeice became a fine poet. Each of the three volumes published in his last seven years was better than the previous one. It was as if he recognised that his strengths as a writer were not best expressed in the long poem but that he was, after all, a lyric poet; a sprinter not a marathon runner. "I have become progressively more humble in the face of my material, " he wrote in an introduction to Solstices (1961), "and therefore less ready to slap poster paint all over it."

His last volume, The Burning Perch, was published 10 days after his death, the day after he would have turned 56. The sentimental claim that a writer's best work was still ahead of him was, in MacNeice's case, possibly true.

The witty, grave poems of that final book are worth a bet for posterity. Louis MacNeice's reputation has risen steadily in recent years. Poignantly, MacNeice's grave in Carrowdore churchyard was, in the decade of his death, a gathering place for three young poets, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon.

WH Auden might be the greater poet, but MacNeice seems to inspire the greater affection. Is that in spite of his flaws, or because of them?