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
A pharaoh's profile, a Krishna's grace, tail like a question mark.
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
Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me, otherwise kill me.
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.
Dublin was a glorious name in our family and had pleasurable associations of violence …Today I am so at home in Dublin, more than in any other city, that I feel it has always been familiar to me … it took me years to see through its soft charm to its bitter prickly kernel – which I quite like too.
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.
Down the road someone is practicing scales, The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails
World is suddener than we fancy it.
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?
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
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.
I am not yet born; O fill me With strength against those who would freeze my humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with one face, a thing
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 womem..involved in personal relationships...susceptible to physical impressions
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.