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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 more proud of what distinguishes man from the animals than of what he has in common with them.
I am at home in Dublin, more than in any other city.
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.
Before I joined the BBC I was, like most of the intelligentsia, prejudiced not only against that institution but against broadcasting in general.
All the people I know have been conditioned by snobbery.
All experiment is made on a basis of tradition; all tradition is the crystallization of experiment.