Louis MacNeice
Louis MacNeice
Frederick Louis MacNeice CBEwas an Irish poet and playwright. He was part of the generation of the Auden Group, also sometimes known as the "Thirties poets", that included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis, nicknamed collectively "MacSpaunday" – a term coined by Roy Campbell, in his Talking Bronco. 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 overtlypolitical as some...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth12 September 1907
My sympathies are Left. On paper and in the soul. But not in my heart or my guts.
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.
I do not envy any animal, though I envy many of their capacities.
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.
The sunlight in the gardenHardens and grows cold,We cannot cage the minuteWithin its nets of gold
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).
Our freedom as free lancesadvances toward its end;The earth compels, upon itSonnets and birds descend;And soon my friend We shall have no time for dances.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The sunlight on the garden Hardens and grows cold, We cannot cage the minute Within its nets of gold