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Louis MacNeice Quotes

Frederick Louis MacNeice CBE was an Irish poet and playwright. He was part of the generation of the Auden Group that included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. MacNeice's body of work was widely appreciated by the public during his lifetime, due in part to his relaxed, but socially and emotionally aware style. Never as overtly political as some of his contemporaries, his work shows a humane opposition to totalitarianism as well as an acute awareness of his Irish roots.

✵ 12. September 1907 – 3. September 1963
Louis MacNeice: 10 quotes2 likes

Famous Louis MacNeice Quotes

“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 beyond me,
My life when they murder by means of my
Hands, my death when they live me.”

Louis MacNeice

"Prayer Before Birth", line 11

“O early one morning I walked out like Agag,
Early one morning to walk through the fire
Dodging the pythons that leaked on the pavements
With tinkle of glasses and tangle of wire.”

Louis MacNeice

"The Streets of Laredo", line 1, from Holes in the Sky (1948)
MacNeice’s poem, a grotesque vision of the London Blitz, is not to be confused with the cowboy ballad "The Streets of Laredo".

“Then twangling their bibles with wrath in their nostrils
From Bonehill Fields came Bunyan and Blake:
"Laredo the golden is fallen, is fallen;
Your flame shall not quench nor your thirst shall not slake."”

Louis MacNeice

"The Streets of Laredo", line 21

“In my own prejudice … I would have of a poet … whose worlds would not be too esoteric … fond of talking … capable of pity and laughter … appreciative of women … involved in personal relationships … susceptible to physical impressions…”

Louis MacNeice

Qualities of a poet from Modern Poetry 1938.

“Politics: distrust all parties but consider capitalism must go.”

Louis MacNeice

MacNeice interview in Twentieth Century Authors, a biographical dictionary of modern literature, edited by Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft; (Third Edition). New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1950 (p. 889).

“It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.”

Louis MacNeice

"Bagpipe Music", line 31

Louis MacNeice Quotes

“It’s no go the Yogi-Man, it’s no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.”

Louis MacNeice

"Bagpipe Music", line 9, from The Earth Compels (1938)

“I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the clubfooted ghoul come near me.”

Louis MacNeice

"Prayer Before Birth", line 1, from Springboard (1944)

“Some on commission, some for the love of learning,
Some because they have nothing better to do
Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden
The drumming of the demon in their ears.”

Louis MacNeice

"The British Museum Reading Room", line 4, from Plant and Phantom (1941)

“Though patriotism includes a sentimental, as it were a family, feeling for place, we can distinguish the ethical motive from the sentimental. At certain times in certain countries there has been a moral urgency to be patriotic when the actual or ideal policy of a man’s nation has been a sine qua non for his conscience. But to-day patriotism, in so far as it means subordination to a specifically national policy, is superannuated. This war, we assume, is not being fought-not by most of us-for any merely national end; we are fighting it, primarily and clearly, for our lives, and secondarily, and, alas! vaguely, for a new international order.”

Louis MacNeice

"Traveller's Return", in Horizon, February 1941, Reprinted in David Pierce Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader. Cork University Press, 2000.

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