Louis MacNeice Quotes & Sayings

You can't express emotion without giving information. — 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

Nearly all children have a feeling for rhythm in words, for the delicate pattern of nursery rhymes. Many adults have lost this feeling and, if they read verse at all, demand a far cruder music than that which they once appreciated. — Louis MacNeice

I am at home in Dublin, more than in any other city. — Louis MacNeice

Politics: distrust all parties but consider capitalism must go. — Louis MacNeice

Man is an unhappy animal and one that can talk. If he was not unhappy, he would have nothing to talk about. But if he had nothing to talk about, he would be unhappy. — Louis MacNeice

The rules or 'laws' of poetry are only tentative devices, an approximate scheme. There is no Sinaitic recipe for poetry, for the individual poem is the norm. — Louis MacNeice

Better authentic mammon than a bogus god. — Louis MacNeice

You know the worst: your wills are fickle,
Your values blurred, your hearts impure
And your past life a ruined church
But let your poison be your cure. — Louis MacNeice

All the people I know have been conditioned by snobbery. — Louis MacNeice

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various. — Louis MacNeice

Give those who are gentle strength,
Give those who are strong a generous imagination,
And make their half-truth true and let the crooked
Footpath find its parent road at length.
...
For never to begin
Anything new because we know there is nothing
New, is an academic sophistry
The original sin.
I have already had friends
Among things and hours and people
But taking them one by one
odd hours and passing people;
Now I must make amends
And try to correlate event with instinct
And me with you or you with you with all,
No longer think of time as a waterfall
Abstracted from a river. — Louis MacNeice

Thus were we weaned to knowledge of the Will
That wills the natural world, but wills us dead. — Louis MacNeice

Democracy - or any improvement on it - will rest on the layman's right to criticize. His criticism will be often - very often - damn silly, but if, like Plato and the Fascists, we take away his right to criticize, we take away his right to appreciate. — Louis MacNeice

Blind wantons like the gulls who scream
And rip the edge off any ideal or dream. — Louis MacNeice

Before I joined the BBC I was, like most of the intelligentsia, prejudiced not only against that institution but against broadcasting in general. — 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

I do not envy any animal, though I envy many of their capacities. — Louis MacNeice

The poet has no greater number of muscles than the ordinary conversationalist; he merely has more highly developed muscles and better coordination. And he practises his activity according to a stricter set of rules. — Louis MacNeice

A city built upon mud;
A culture built upon profit;
Free speech nipped in the bud,
The minority always guilty.
Why should I want to go back
To you, Ireland, my Ireland?
...
Her mountains are still blue, her rivers flow
Bubbling over the boulders.
She is both a bore and a bitch;
Better close the horizon,
Send her no more fantasy, no more longings which
Are under a fatal tariff.
For common sense is the vogue
And she gives her children neither sense nor money
Who slouch around the world with a gesture and a brogue
And a faggot of useless memories. — Louis MacNeice

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold — 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

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

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

Let the old Muse loosen her stays
Or give me a new Muse with stockings and suspenders
And a smile like a cat,
With false eyelashes and finger-nails of carmine
And dressed by Schiaparelli, with a pill-box hat.
...
Give me a houri but houris are too easy,
Give me a nun;
We'll rape the angels off the golden reredos
Before we're done. — Louis MacNeice

I am not yet born; Forgive me For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words When they speak me, my thoughts when they think me, My treason engendered by traitors beyound me, My life when they murder by means of my hands, my death when they live me. — Louis MacNeice

Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden the drumming of the demon in their ears — Louis MacNeice

My sympathies are Left. On paper and in the soul. But not in my heart or my guts. — Louis MacNeice

I am not yet born; O fill me with strength against those who would freeze my humanity. — Louis MacNeice

The poet is a specialist in something which everyone practises. Herein, poetry differs from the other arts. Everyone does not practise music or painting or even dancing, but everyone without exception puts together words poetically every day of his life. — Louis MacNeice

Style without content is bad style. — Louis MacNeice

And I envy the intransigence of my own
Countrymen who shoot to kill and never
See the victim's face become their own
Or find his motive sabotage their motives. — 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

Broadcasting is plastic; while it can ape the press, it can also emulate the arts. — 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

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

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me, otherwise kill me. — 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

Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope,
And God Save
as you prefer
the King or Ireland.
The land of scholars and saints:
Scholars and saints my eye, the land of ambush,
Purblind manifestoes, never-ending complaints — Louis MacNeice

Corner Seat
Suspended in a moving night
The face in the reflection train
Looks at first sight as self-assured
As your own face - But look again:
Windows between you and the world
Keep out the cold, keep out the fright;
Then why does your reflection seem
So lonely in the moving night? — Louis MacNeice

And at this hour of the day it is no good saying
'Take away this cup';
Having helped to fill it ourselves it is only logic
That now we should drink it up. — Louis MacNeice

All that I would like to be is human, having a share
in a civilized, articulate and well-adjusted
community where the mind is given its due
but the body is not distrusted — Louis MacNeice

Self-assertion more often than not is vulgar, but a live and vulgar dog who keeps on barking is better than a dead lion, however dignified. — Louis MacNeice

I am more proud of what distinguishes man from the animals than of what he has in common with them. — Louis MacNeice

It is a retrogression when human beings begin to insist on uniform, on one-mindedness, on conditioning their offspring so that all their reactions are automatic. — Louis MacNeice

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

In writing 'A Portrait of Athens' I have attempted - rather impressionistically - to give a panorama of its present. But I have also brought in its past because I sincerely think that there is a continuity. — Louis MacNeice

It's no go the merry-go-round, it's no go the rickshaw
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow. — Louis MacNeice

Though I do regard the Inquisition in general and the burning of Giordano Bruno in particular as blots on the history of the Roman Catholic Church, I am far from being actuated by hatred of that church, and in fact cannot imagine that European civilization would have developed or survived without it. — Louis MacNeice

A fortress against ideas and against the
Shuddering insidious shock of the theory-vendors
The little sardine men crammed in a monster toy
Who tilt their aggregate beast against our crumbling Troy. — Louis MacNeice

It's no go the picture palace, it's no go the stadium,
It's no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums.
It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections,
Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension. — Louis MacNeice

September has come, it is hers
Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,
Whose nature prefers
Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.
So I give her this month and the next
Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already
So many of its days intolerable or perplexed
But so many more so happy.
Who has left a scent on my life, and left my walls
Dancing over and over with her shadow
Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls
And all of London littered with remembered kisses. — Louis MacNeice

Time was away and somewhere else,
There were two glasses and two chairs
And two people with one pulse. — Louis MacNeice

The Sunlight on the Garden

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden. — Louis MacNeice

Let us thank God for valour in abstraction
For those who go their own way, will not kiss
The arse of law and order nor compound
For physical comfort at the price of pride — 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

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

Rows of books around me stand,
Fence me in on either hand;
Through that forest of dead words
I would hunt the living birds
So I write these lines for you
Who have felt the death-wish too,
All the wires are cut, my friends
Live beyond the severed ends. — Louis MacNeice

As things may turn out in the future, people may (though I doubt it) find that their work gives them all the enjoyment - physical, intellectual or aesthetic - which they may require. That certainly is not so now. — Louis MacNeice

I have just finished my novel (rough draft). It is to be called 'Anacoluthon.' This will make the public think it is an historical romance. — Louis MacNeice

The argument was wilful,
The alternatives untrue,
We need no metaphysics
To sanction what we do
Or to muffle us in comfort
From what we did not do. — Louis MacNeice

Fort of the Dane,
Garrison of the Saxon,
Augustan capital
Of a Gaelic nation,
Appropriating all
The alien brought,
You give me time for thought. — Louis MacNeice

I cannot drug my life with the present moment;
The present moment may rape
but all in vain
The future, for the future remains a virgin
Who must be tried again. — Louis MacNeice

The poet is a maker, not a retail trader. — Louis MacNeice

Everyone is not able, or inclined, to write poetry in the narrower sense any more than everyone is qualified to take part in a walking race. But just as all of us can and do walk, so all of us can and do use language poetically. — Louis MacNeice

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me. — Louis MacNeice

There seeps from heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces
The guttural sorrow of the refugees. — 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

All the arts, to varying degrees, involve some kind of a compromise. This being so, how far need the radio dramatist go to meet the public without losing sight of himself and his own standards of value? — Louis MacNeice

World is suddener than we fancy it. — 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

A pharaoh's profile, a Krishna's grace, tail like a question mark. — Louis MacNeice

Wyndham Lewis is basically a pessimist, thinking of human beings as doomed animals or determinist machines. His theory of satire is based on this view, and he finds plenty of evidence to support it in contemporary practice. — Louis MacNeice

My stepmother appeared when I was about 9. My brother was sent off to an institute in Scotland & my sister & I were sent to school. As my stepmother's ideas were then wholly Quaker, mixed with a naive & charming innocence & a little snobbery, it was one dotty epoch on top of another. I always remained terrified of my father. — Louis MacNeice

I was the rector's son, born to the anglican order,
Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor;
The Chichesters knelt in marble at the end of a transept
With ruffs about their necks, their portion sure. — Louis MacNeice

All experiment is made on a basis of tradition; all tradition is the crystallization of experiment. — 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

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

Down the road someone is practicing scales,
The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails — 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 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

None of our hearts are pure, we always have mixed motives.
Are self deceivers, but the worst of all
Deceits is to murmur 'Lord, I am not worthy'
And, lying easy, turn your face to the wall. — Louis MacNeice