Some day I shall write a novel and call it ‘A Walking Tour in the Congo’ or ‘Thrills and Spills in Aeronautics’; but I keep this type of title as a last & mercenary resort. Louis MacNeice Read Quote
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. Louis MacNeice Read Quote
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. Louis MacNeice Read Quote
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). Louis MacNeice Read Quote
Mysticism, in the narrow sense, implies a specific experience which is foreign to most poets and most men, but on the other hand, it represents an instinct which is a human sine qua non. Louis MacNeice Read Quote
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. Louis MacNeice Read Quote
My sympathies are Left. On paper and in the soul. But not in my heart or my guts. Louis MacNeice Read Quote
My birth was managed so rottenly that my mother had eventually to have a hysterectomy, after which she was ill off & on till she dies for obscure reasons when I was just 7. Louis MacNeice Read Quote
For this reason poets and artists developed the doctrine of Art for Art’s Sake. The community did not appear to need them, so, tit for tat, they did not need the community. This being granted, it was no longer necessary or even desirable to make one’s poetry either intelligible or sympathetic to the community. Louis MacNeice Read Quote
Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something – with their eye on the object or the end. The essence of the poetry does not lie in the thing described or in the message imparted but in the resulting concrete unity, the poem. Louis MacNeice Read Quote
