Louis MacNeice

"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..."

"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."

"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."

"Where skill will no longer languish nor energy be trammelled To competition and graft, Exploited in subservience but not allegiance To an utterly lost and daft System that gives a few at fancy prices Their fancy lives, While ninety-nine in the hundred who never attend the banquet Must wash the grease of ages off the knives."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"Politics: distrust all parties but consider capitalism must go."

"If the term “poet's poet” means a poet whose virtuosity can be fully appreciated only by other poets, it may be applied to MacNeice. But if it were taken to imply that his work cannot be enjoyed by the larger public of poetry readers, the term would be misleading. He had the Irishman's unfailing ear for the music of verse, and he never published a line that is not good reading. I am very proud of having published the first volume he had to offer after coming down from the university."

"The elegance in MacNeice's poetry is more one of sensuality now and less one of ingenuity, and the poems he is writing are the experiences of a lonely contemplative person, occupied with himself and with the world we share."

"The difference between loneliness and mere solitariness, after all, is that the lonely sensibility wants to be otherwise. There is a reaching out that never quite touches. In MacNeice’s best work, the ingeniousness and inevitable failure of that reaching indicates the depth of the longing. He is a superb love poet, for instance, yet his love poems often foreground their own ephemerality, like ice sculptures in the summertime."