A harrassed and dubious childhood under the hand of a well-meaning but barbarous mother’s help from County Armagh led me to think of the North of Ireland as prison and the South as a land of escape. – Louis MacNeice
I am 33 years old, and what can I have been doing that I still am in a muddle? But everyone else is, too; maybe our muddles are concurrent. – Louis MacNeice
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
The poet is primarily a spokesman, making statements or incantations on behalf of himself or others – usually for both, for it is difficult to speak for oneself without speaking for others or to speak for others without speaking for oneself. – Louis MacNeice
For this reason poets and artists developed the doctrine of Art for Art’s Sake. The community did not appear to need them, so, tit for tat, they did not need the community. This being granted, it was no longer necessary or even desirable to make one’s poetry either intelligible or sympathetic to the community. – Louis MacNeice
I am not yet born; O fill me with strength against those who would freeze my humanity. – Louis MacNeice
I would admit that poetry is something more than mere communication and that if that ‘something more’ could be abstracted from the whole, it might well prove to be that which makes the whole a poem. – Louis MacNeice
My birth was managed so rottenly that my mother had eventually to have a hysterectomy, after which she was ill off & on till she dies for obscure reasons when I was just 7. – Louis MacNeice
We are all fed from hundreds and thousands of hands. Often we do not know whose they are nor how they work. Only a few of us ever visualize the hands that grope in the coal mines or push levers in the mills or handle axes in the lumber camp. – Louis MacNeice
Dublin was hardly worried by the war; her old preoccupations were still preoccupations. The intelligentsia continued their parties; their mutual malice was as effervescent as ever. – Louis MacNeice
Some day I shall write a novel and call it ‘A Walking Tour in the Congo’ or ‘Thrills and Spills in Aeronautics’; but I keep this type of title as a last & mercenary resort. – Louis MacNeice
The teapot takes in water and gives out tea. So the human individual takes in anything you give him and promptly transforms it; he is ready to give you out again his own reactions – first, in thought and emotion, then in voice or action. – Louis MacNeice
Mysticism, in the narrow sense, implies a specific experience which is foreign to most poets and most men, but on the other hand, it represents an instinct which is a human sine qua non. – Louis MacNeice
Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something – with their eye on the object or the end. The essence of the poetry does not lie in the thing described or in the message imparted but in the resulting concrete unity, the poem. – Louis MacNeice
In January 1921, I found myself wonderfully alone in an empty carriage in a rocking train in the night between Waterloo and Sherborne. Stars on each side of me; I ran from side to side of the carriage, checking the constellations. – Louis MacNeice
A poet should always be ‘collaborating’ with his public, but this public, in the mass, cannot make itself heard, and he has to guess at its requirements and its criticisms. – Louis MacNeice
When I went to bed as a child, I was told, ‘You don’t know where you’ll wake up.’ When I ran in the garden, I was told that running was bad for the heart. Everything had its sinister aspect – milk shrinks the stomach, lemon thins the blood. – Louis MacNeice
Nationalism of the Irish type is often regarded as reactionary. With the World Revolution and the Classless Society waiting for the midwife, why take a torch to the stable to assist at the birth of a puppy? Even if the puppy is pedigree. On this question I am unable to make up my mind. – Louis MacNeice
The individualist is an atom thinking about himself (Thank God I am not as other men); the communist, too often, is an atom having ecstasies of self-denial (Thank God I am one in a crowd). – Louis MacNeice
