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| Poetry | Prose |
| Some Snippets ... | Four Collectionsn | Familiar Lines |
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Belfast: ‘A city built upon mud, / A culture built upon profit, / Free speech nipped in the bud / The minority always guilty.’ [q. source.] |
“Relics” |
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| —first printed in The Penguin New Writing, ed. John Lehmann ([n. iss.] 1947), pp.76. |
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“Last before America” |
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—Epigraph to Intro. of Last Before America: Irish and American Writing: Essays in Honour of Michael Allen, ed. Fran Brearton & Eamonn Hughes (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 2001), p.ix. |
| “Train to Dublin” |
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| —Extract quoted by Eunice Yeates on Facebook (05.01.2017). |
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| “Snow” |
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| — Collected Poems (1967); Selected Poems, ed. Michael Longley (Faber 1998, p.32). |
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“Autobiography”: ‘My mother wore a yellow dress; / Gently, gently gentleness / Come back early or never come. / [..] When I was five, the black dreams came / Nothing after was quite the same. / Come back early or never come. / [...] When I woke the did not care; Nobody, Nobody was there / Come back early or never come. / When my silent terror cried, Nobody, nobody replied / Come back early or never come. / The dark was talking to the deadh / The lamp was dark beside my bed. / Come back early or never come.’ (Selected Poems, ed. W. H. Auden, 1964, p.70.)
“Valediction”: ‘Park your car in the city of Dublin, see Sackville Street / Without the sandbags in the old photos, meet / The statues of the patriots, history never dies, / At any rate in Ireland, arson and murder are legacies / Like old rings hollow-eyed without their stone / Dublin talisman.’ In the same poem, Belfast is a landscape of ‘cowled and hunted faces’ in a ‘country of callous lava cooled to stone.’ In “Belfast”, he writes of ‘Time punched with holes like a steel sheet, time / Hardened the faces, veneering with a gret and speckled rime.’ (All quoted in Emma Carroll, PG Dip., UU 2011; see full text - infra.)
“Carrickfergus” [1937]: ‘I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries / To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams: / Thence to Smoky Carrick in County Antrim / Where the bottle-neck harbour collects the mud which jams // The little boats beneath the Norman castle, / The pier shining with lumps of salt; / The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses / But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind and halt. […]‘I was the rector’s son, born of the Anglican order, / Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor. […] I went to school in Dorset, the world of parents / Contracted into a puppet world of sons / Far from the mill girls, the smell of porter, the salt-mines. / And the soldiers with their guns.’ [End; (Selected Poems, Faber & Faber 1940, ppp.39-40; Collected Poems, ed. E. R. Dodds, 1966, pp.69-70.)
Autumn Journal (1939): ‘[…/] And I remember, when I was little, the fear / Bandied among the servants / That Casement would land at the pier / With a sword and a horde of rebels; / And how we used to expect, at a later date, / When the wind blew from the west, the noise of shooting / Starting in the evening at eight / In Belfast in the York Street district; / And the voodoo of the Orange bands / Drawing an iron net through darkest Ulster, / Flailing the limbo lands / The linen mills, the long wet grass, the ragged hawthorn. / And one read black where the other read white, his hope / The other man’s damnation: / 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, / The born martyr and the gallant ninny; / The grocer drunk with the drum, / The land-owner shot in his bed, the angry voices / Piercing the broken fanlight in the slum, / The shawled woman weeping at the garish altar. / Kathleen ni Houlihan! Why / Must a country, like a ship or a car, be always female, / Mother or sweetheart? A woman passing by, / We did but see her passing, / Passing like a patch of sun on the rainy hill / And yet we love her for ever and hate our neighbour / And each one in his will / Binds his heirs to continuance of hatred.’ (Autumn Journal [1939], Canto XVI, in Collected Poems, 1966, p.131f., quoted by Jon Stallworthy, in ‘Fathers and Sons’, in Bullán, 2, 1, Summer 1995, pp.8-9; also, in part, in Robert Welch, ‘Irish Writing in English’, in Introduction English Studies, ed. Richard Bradford, London: Pearson Educ. 1996, p.666; also in Louis MacNeice, Selected Poems, ed. Michael Longley, Faber 1998, p.62.)
Autumn Journal (1939): ‘Such was my country and I thought I was well / Out of it, educated and domiciled in England, / Though yet her name keeps ringing like a bell / In an under-water belfry. / Why do we like being Irish? Partly because / It gives us a hold on the sentimental English / As members of a world that never was, / Baptised with fairy water; / And partly because Ireland is small enough / To be still thought of as with family feeling, / And because the waves are rough / That split her from a more commercial culture; / And because one feels that here one can do local work that is not at the world’ mercy / And that on this tiny stage with luck a man / Might see the end of one particular action. / It is self-deception of course; / There is no immunity on this island either; / A cart that is drawn by someone’s else’s horse / And carrying goods to someone else’s market. / The bombs in the turnip sack, the sniper from the roof / Griffith, Connolly, Collins, where have they brought us? / Ourselves alone! Let the round tower stand aloof / In a world of bursting mortar! / Let the children fumble their sums in a half-dead language; / Let the censor be busy on the books; pull down the Georgian slums; / Let the games be played in Gaelic. Let them grow beet sugar; let them build / A factory in every hamlet; / Let them pigeon-hole the souls of the killed / into sheep and goats, patriots and traitors.’ […]; ‘Why should I want to go back / To you, Ireland, my Ireland? / The blots on the page are so black / That they cannot be covered with shamrock / I hate your grandiose airs, / Your sob-stuff, your laugh and your swagger, / Your assumption that everyone cares / Who is king of the Castle.’ (Autumn Journal, XVI, pp.62-64; Collected Poems, ed. E. R. Dodds, 131-33; quoted in large part in Brian de Breffny, Foreword, The Irish World: The History and Cultural Achievements of the Irish People, ed. de Breffny, London: Thames & Hudson 1977, p.6.)
Autumn Journal (1939): Ireland is ‘both a bore and a bitch [who] gives her children niether sense nor money / Who slouch around the world with a gesture an a brogue / And a faggot of useless memories.’ (Q.p.; quoted in Emma Carroll, PG Dip., UU 2011.)
Autumn Journal (1939): ‘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’ (Autumn Journal, XVI, Collected Poems, 1966, p.131); […] ‘The land of scholars and saints: / Scholars and saints my eye, the land of ambush, / Purblind manifestos, never-ending complaints / The born martyr and the gallant ninny; / The grocer drunk with the drum, / The land-owner shot in his bed [...] / Such was my country and I though I was well / Out of it, educated and domiciled in England, / Though yet her name keeps ringing like a bell / In an under-water belfry’ (Autumn Journal, XVI; p.132.)
Autumn Journal (1939): ‘But no abiding content can grow out of these minds / Fuddled with blood, always caught by blinds ... // I will exorcise my blood / And not to have by baby-clothes my shroud / I will acquire an attitude not yours / And become as one of your holiday visitors, / And however often I may come / Farewell, my country, and in perpetuum ...’ ([q.p.]; quoted in Joris Duytschaever, ‘History in the Poetry of Derek Mahon’, Duytschaever and Geert Lernout, eds., History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Literature, Amsterdam: Rodopi 1988, pp.97-109; pp.103-04.)
Autumn Journal (1939): ‘Torn before birth from where my fathers dwelt, / Schooled from the age of ten to a foreign voice / Yet neither Western Ireland nor Southern England / Cancels this interlude; what chance mispelt, / May never now be righted by my choice. // Whatever then my inherited or acquired / Affinities, such remains my childhood’s frame / Like a belated rock in the red Antrim clay / That cannot at this era change its pitch or name - / And the pre-natal mountain is far away.’ (ibid., p.104; q. source.)
Autumn Journal (3): ‘We who have been brought up to think of “Gallant Little Belgium” / As so much blague / Are now preparing again to essay good through evil for the sake of Prague.’ Further, ‘We feel negotiation is not in vain - / Save my skin and damn by conscience / And negotiation wins, / If you can call it winning / And here we are - just as before - safe in our skins; / Glory to God for Munich.’ (Quoted in Brian Inglis, Downstart, Chatto & Windus 1990, p.73, with remark: ‘Nobody caught the mood better than Louis MacNeice in his Autumn Journal’; idem.)
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“Neutrality”: ‘The neutral island facing the Atlantic, / the neutral island in the heart of man, / Are bitterly soft reminders of the beginnings / That ended before the end began. / Look into your heart, you will find a County Sligo, / A bevel hill with for navel a cairn of stones, / You willfind the shadow and sheen of a moleskin mountain / And a litter of chronicles and bones. / Look into your heart, you will find fermenting rivers, / Intricacies of gloom and glint, / You will find such ducats of dream and great doubloons of ceremony / As nobody to-day would mint. / But then look eastwards from your heart, there bulks / A continent, close, dark, as archetypal as sin, / While to the west off your own shores the mackerel / Are fat with the flesh of your kin.’ (Penguin New Writing, March 1943, p.41; Collected Poems, ed. E. R. Dodds, 1966, p.255.)
“The Springboard”: ‘He never made the dive - not while I watched. / High above London, naked in the night/Perched on a board. I peered up through the bars / Made by his fear and mine but it was more than fright/That kept him crucified among the budding stars. / Yes, it was unbelief. He knew only too well/That circumstances called for sacrifice / But, shivering there, spreadeagled above the town, / His blood began to haggle over the price / History would pay if he were to throw himself down. / If it would mend the world, that would be worth while / But he, quite rightly, long had ceased to believe / In any Utopia or Peace-upon-Earth; / His friends would find in his death neither ransom nor reprieve/But only a grain of faith - for what it was worth. // And yet we know he knows what he must do. / There above London where the gargoyles grin / He willdive like a bomber past the broken steeple, / One man wiping out his own original sin / And, like ten million others, dying for the people.’ (Penguin New Writing, March 1943, p.42.)
“Western Landscape”: ‘In the constituencies of quartz and bog-oak ... a bastard / Out of the West by urban civilisation / (Which unwished father claims me – so I must take / What I can before I go) ... neither free from all roots nor a root peasant.’ (Collected Poems, 1996, p.257.)
“Valediction”: ‘On the cardboard lid I saw when I was four / Was the trademark of a hound and a round tower / And that was Irish glamour, and in the cemetery / Sham Celtic crosses claimed our individuality // ... // I can say that Ireland is hooey, Ireland is / A gallery of fake tapestries / But I cannot deny my part to which my self is wed, / The woven figure cannot undo its thread. (Collected Poems, London: Faber, 1966, p.53; Poems, ed. Michael Longley, p.13.) Further, ‘Country of callous lava cooled to stone, / Of minute sodden haycocks, of ship-sirens’ moan, / Of falling intonations - I would call you to book / I would say, This is what you have given me / Indifference and sentimentality / A metallic giggle, a fumbling hand, / A heart that leaps at a fife band [...] / Cursed be he that curses his mother. I cannot be / Anyone else than what this land engendered me.’ (Quoted in Alan Riordan, review of Peter McDonald, ed. Collected Poems, in Books Ireland, April 2007, p.73.)
“Dreamland”: ‘To the tourist / This land may seem a dreamland, an escape, / But to her sons and even more her daughters / A dream from which they yearn to awake; the liner / Outhoots the owls of the past. The saffron kilt / may vie with Orange sash but the black and white / Of the press of the rest of the world scales down their feuds / To storms in a broken tea-cup. What is the Border / Compared with the mushroom fears of the dizzy globe / in which no borders hold?’ (Epilogue to Terence Brown & Alec Reid , Time Was Away, p.2; quoted in part in James Liddy, ‘Irish Poets and the Protestant Muse’, Eire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies, 14, 2, Summer 1979, pp.118-[28]; p.121.
“Day of Renewal, IV”: ‘This year, last year[s], one time, ever, / Different, indifferent, careless, kind, / Ireland, England, New England, Greece, — / The plumstones blossom in my mind.’ (Collected Poems, ed. Dodds, 1966, p.312.)
Sundry verses: ‘All over the world people are toasting the King; / Red lozenges of light as each one lights his glass / But I will not give you any idol or idea, creed or king’ (p.21); ‘It is we, I think, who are the idols and it is God / Has set us up as men who are painted wood, / And the train carries us about.’ (p.21); ‘I give you the incidental things which pass / Outward through space exactly as each was.’ (p.21); ‘I would like to give you more but I cannot hold / This stuff within my hands and the train goes on; / I know that there are further synthesis.’ ([Longley edn.], p.22).
The North: ‘And the North, where I was a boy, / Is still the north, / veneered with the grime of Glasgow, / Thousands of men / whom nobody will employ, / Standing at the corners, coughing ...’ (Autumn Journal [Coll. Poems, 1966, p.133]; quoted in Fred Johnson, reviewing Patrick Crotty, ed., Modern Irish Poetry, 1995, in Books Ireland, April 1996, p.92. Also: ‘And the voodoo of the Orange bands / Drawing an iron net through darkest Ulster / Flailing the limbo lands ...’; ‘And one read black where the other read white, his hope / The other man’s damnation: / Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope, / And God save – as you prefer – the King or Ireland.’ (Autumn Journal, q.pp.) Cf., ‘I am aware that there are overstatements in this poem, e.g., the passages dealing with Ireland, &c.’ (Note to Autumn Journal). See also epigraph to Sam Hanna Bell, A Man Flourishing (1973): ‘The hard cold fire of the northerner / Frozen into his blood from the fire of his basalt / Glare form behind the mica of his eyes / And the salt carrion water brings him wealth.’
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| Poetry | Prose |
Autumn Journal [Prefatory Note]: ‘In a journal or a personal letter a man writes what he feels at the moment; to attempt scientific truthfulness would be - paradoxically - dishonest. The turth of a lyric is different from the truths of science, and this poemis half-way between the lyric and the didactic poem. [...] Nor am I attempting to offer what so many people now demand of poets - a final verdict or a balanced judgement. It is the nature of this poem to be neither final nor balanced. I have certain beliefs which, I hope, emerge in the course o it but which I have refused to abstract from their context. For this reason I shall probable be called a trimmer by some and a sentimental extremist by others. But poetry in my opinion must be honest before anything else and I refuse to be “objective” or clear-cut at the cost of honesty.’ (Collected Poems, 1966, p.101; final sentence quoted in Terence Brown, Northern Voices, Gill & Macmillan 1975, p.105.)
| “Poetry To-day” (1935) |
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| [...]We must not too readily assign the War as a cause of developments in the arts. By the time the War broke out, Mr Pound and his Imagists had already asserted themselves, Mr Eliot had read his Laforgue, Mr Yeats was working steadily to make his verse less “poetic”, Free Verse was an old story and Marinetti had invented Futurism. But in England at any rate this left-wing literature did not become notorious till after the War. And in 1922 appeared the classic English test-pieces of modern prose and [15] verse - Ulysses by James Joyce and The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. To most of the intelligent minority both these works appeared incoherent and obscure; Ulysses was also considered overwhelmingly obscene. The same minority would now agree that neither work is so difficult if approached from the right angle, and that as for obscenity there is far more in any popular magazine. We have new standards of coherence and of poetic meaning. Joyce as well as Eliot has had great influence on our poetry - for two reasons. As a technician he uses words in that subtle way which is usually the privilege of poets. As a very sensitive observer his acceptances and rejections (vulgarly called his realism) have sanctioned the acceptance or rejection of certain subject matters in poetry. (p.16.) |
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Mr Yeats is the best example of how a poet ought to develop if he goes on writing till he is old. I am not one of those who have nothing to say for his earlier poems and everything to say for his later poems. He is a very fine case of identity in difference and anyone, who is not pleading some irrelevant cause, can see this; e.g., to mention details, he still speaks of “Tully” and he still uses the fantastic refrain à la D. G. Rossetti or Morris. But he has, in his own way, kept up with the times. Technically he offers many parallels to the youngest English poets. Spender is like him in that they both have worked hard to attain the significant statement, avoiding the obvious rhythm and the easy blurb. (p.40). |
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Dialogue with F. R. Higgins (Tendencies in Modern Poetry: A Discussion Between Higgins and Louis MacNiece, on BBC Northern Ireland, May 1939) [extract]:
| McNeice: ‘Am I to take it that you think that today racial rhythm is more important for the poet than theinternation or extra-national rhythms we have mentioned?’ |
| Higgins: Yes, I would say racial rhythms are better for the poet who exists within the rhythm than the international rhythms that are only dimly perceived or felt by those who try to interpret them. |
| MacNeice: On those premises there is more likelihood of good poetry appearmg among the Storm Troopers of Germany than in the cosmopolitan communities of Paris or New York. |
| Higgins: I am afraid, Mr. MacNeice you as an Irishman, cannot escape from your blood, nor from your blood-music that brings the racial character to mind. Irish poetry remains a creation happily, fundamentally rooted in rural civilisation, yet aware and in touch with the elementals of the future. We have seen the drift of English poetry during the past few centuries - the retreat from the field to the park, from the pavement to the macadamed street, from the human zoological garden to the cinder heap where English verse pathetically droops today. You do not wish to repudiate us for that?’ |
| McNeice: I have the feeling that you have sidetracked me into an Ireland versus England match. I am so little used to thinking of poetry in terms of race consciousness that no doubt this was very good for me. However, I am still unconverted. I think that one may have such a thing as one’s racial blood-music, but that, like one’s unconscious, it may be left to take care of itself. You have been eulogising present-day Irish poets and damning present-day English ones whom you think of as drooping young men on a cinder heap. The last time I saw these young men, they were not very drooping and I do not think that their poetry droops either. However, whether their poetry droops or not, poets of the Auden-Spender school (which is now producing the most vital poetry in England) are attempting something legitimate. Compared with you, I take a rather common-sense view of poetry. I think that the poet is a sensitive instrument designed to record anything which interests his mind or affects his emotions. If a gasometer, for instance, affects his emotions, or if the Marxian dialectic, let us say, interests his mind, then let them come into his poetry. He will be fulfilling his function as a poet if he records these things with integrity and with as much music as he can compass or as is appropriate to the subject.’ (Quoted prefatorily in Paul Muldoon, Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Verse; cited as above in Jon Stallworthy, ‘Fathers and Sons’ [on McNeice with Mahon, Longley and Muldoon], in Bullán, 2, 1, Summer 1995, pp.8-9.) |
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The Irish are ... (extract from W. B. Yeats, 1941; 1967): ‘But as I said it is unsafe to generalise about Ireland or the Irish. Their character could best be expressed in a set of antinomies which would require an analysis that I cannot give here. We could say for example The Irish are Sentimental (see any popular song book) but we could also say: The Irish are Unsentimental (see John Bull’s Other Island) or again: The Irish are formal (witness the conventions of the peasantry, the intricacies of Gaelic poetry, the political technique of Mr. de Valera) and The Irish are slapdash (witness the way they run their houses). Or again: Ireland is a land of Tradition (think of the Irishman’s notorious long memory) and Ireland suffers from lack of tradition (see Yeats’s well founded strictures in Dramatic Personae). Such antinomies could easily be multiplied. Yeats himself in an essay on The Celtic Element in Literature (1902) shows that he is conscious of the dialectic: “when an early Irish poet calls his Irishman famous for much loving, and a proverb [...] talks of the lovelessness of the Irishman, they may say but the same thing, for if your passion is great enough it leads you to a country where there are many cloisters”. The Irish dialectic is best perhaps, resolved by a paradox: Ireland like other countries has obvious limitations; these limitations, if rightly treated, become assets. I would suggest therefore as a final antinomy this: It is easy to be Irish; it is difficult to be Irish. (pp.50-51; quoted in Patrick Sheeran, “The Novels of Liam O’Flaherty: A Study in Romantic Realism”, Ph.D., UCG 1972, p.154.)
Wild Irish: ‘At school of course I had begun by playing The Wild Irish Boy, although handicapped by the lack of the usual W.I.B. boasting matter; I could not ride a horse, I had never poached salmon, my background was pathetically suburban. But a boy at a prep school who lived in Dublin claimed to have been shot at by Countess Markiewicz and I once travelled home in comany with her daughters; at least I though they were her daughters, at any rate they smoked.’ (The Strings are False; quoted in Christina Hunt Mahony [forthcoming paper, 2002].)
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‘“The West of Ireland”, a phrase which still stirs me, if not like a trumpet, like a fiddle half-heard through a cattle fair ... The very name of Connemara seemed too rich for any ordinary place. It appeared to be a country of windswept open spaces and mountains blazing with whims and seas that were never quiet, and drowned palaces beneath them, and seals and eagles and turf smoke and cottagers who were always laughing and who gave you milk when you asked for a glass of water. And the people’s voices were different there, soft and rich like my father’s. (‘Landscapes of My Youth’, in The Strings are False, 1965, pp.216-17; quoted in Christopher John Fauske ’A Life Merely Glimpsed: Louis MacNeice and the End of the Anglo-Irish Tradition’, Tjebbe A. Westendrop & Jane Mallinson, eds., Politics and the Rhetoric of Poetry: Perspectives on Modern Anglo-Irish Poetry, Amstersdam: Rodopi 1995,p.181; available at JSTOR - online; last accessed 05.05.2022.)
Advice to Poets: ‘[Poets] must avoid the two extremes of psittacism and aphasia. There are cultured people in England today who write poems which are mere and sheer Shelley; these are psittacists; they are betraying themselves (and, incidentally, betraying Shelley). There are also the enthusiasts (mostly Americans in Paris) who set out to scrap tradition from A to Z; this should logically lead to aphasia; that they do not become quite aphasic is due to their powers of self-deception. How are we to do justice, not to the segregated Past or Present, but to their concrete antinomy[?]’ Further, ‘The problem is especially difficult for us because, unlike our more parochial predecessors, we have so many Pasts and Presents to choose from. We have too much choice and not enough brute limitations. The eclectic is usually impotent ... .’ (‘Poetry Today’, 1935; Heuser, Selected Literary Criticism, pp.13-14; quoted in Edna Longley, ‘Traditionalism and Modernism in Irish Poetry’, in Lernout, 1991, pp.159-73; p.161.)
Desiderata: ‘I would have a poet able-bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions’ (Quoted in Matthew Sweeney and John Hartley Williams, Writing Poetry and Getting Published (London: Hodder & Stoughton 1997), p.1; cited in Michael Faherty, paper in That Other World: The Supernatural and the Fantastic in Irish Literature: Transactions of the Princess Grace Irish Library Conference, 1998.[ top ]
Realism: ‘My own impression is that pure “realism” is in our time almost played out, though most works of fiction will remain realistic on the surface. The single track mind and the single-plane novel or play are almost bound to falsify the world in which we live. The fact that there is method in madness and the fact that there is fact in fantasy (and equally fantasy in “fact”) have been brought home to us not only by Freud and other psychologists but by events themselves. This being so, reportage can no longer masquerade as art. So the novelist, abandoning the “straight” method of photography, is likely to resort once more not only to the twist of plot but to all kinds of other twists which may help him to do justice to the world’s complexity. Some element of parable therefore, far from making a work thinner and more abstract, ought to make it more concrete. Man does after all live by symbols.’ (The Dark Tower and Other Radio Scripts, 1947, p. 21; quoted in Terence Brown, ‘Louis MacNeice and the “Dark Conceit”’, in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Oct. 1972, p.17.)
Mimesis?: ‘Poetry is not a mere reflection or a mere imitation of life but it has an essential relationship to life ... I am not maintaining that the value of poetry consists in its truthfulness to life but only that a poems is vitiated if it relies upon a falsehood to life ... Brooke’s war-sonnets rely upon an essential falsehood.’ (The Poetry of W. B. Yeats, Faber 1941, p.17.)
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W. B. Yeats: ‘The clannish obsession with one’s own family; the combination of an anarchist individualism with puritanical taboos and inhibitions; the half-envious contempt for England; the constant desire to show off; a sentimental attitude to Irish history; a callous indifference to those outside the gates; an identification of Ireland with the spirit and England with crass materialism.’ (Ibid.; q.p. & source; and see longer extract from W. B. Yeats, 1941, in Ricorso Library, “Criticism” [W. B. Yeats], infra.)
[ For more remarks on Yeats, see extracts in Yeats > Commentary - as attached. ]
’30s Poets: ‘The “’thirties” poets, the so-called “social consciousness” poets, quite overplayed their hand and passed into mere propaganda, and by this I mean that they stated an opinion or introduced an image not because it came from their experience, but because it was the thing to do. But a poet should never, never, fake his reactions.’ (‘English Poetry Today’, The Listener, Vol. XL, No. 1,023, 2 Sept. 1948, p.346; cited in Terence Brown, Northern Voices, Gill & Macmillan 1975, p.105.)
Dialectics: ‘I think that, generally speaking, my basic conception of life being dialectics (in the philosophic, not the political sense), I have tended to swing to and fro between descriptive or physical images (which are ‘correct’ as far as they go) and faute de mieux metaphysical, mythical or mystical images (which can never go far enough). “Eternity”, wrote Blake (Yeats’s favourite quotation), “is in love with the productions of Time”, and I have tried to pay homage to both. But the two being interlinked, the two sets of images approach each other.’ (‘Experiences with Images’, Orpheus II, 1949, p.126; cited in Terence Brown, Northern Voices, Gill & Macmillan, 1975, p.105.)
Passive reporter? ‘A poet should look at, feel about and think about the world around him, but he should not suppose his job consists in merely reporting on it.’ (Varieties of Parable [lecture] Cambridge UP, 1965, p.7; cited in Terence Brown, Northern Voices, Gill & Macmillan, 1975, p.105.)
My Self: ‘If you know what my whole self and my only self is, you know a lot more than I do. As far as I can make out, I not only have many different selves but I am often not myself at all. Maybe it is just when I am not myself - when I am thrown out of gear by circumstances or emotion - that I feel like writing poetry. I suggest that you read what Keats wrote in a letter about the poet’s personality.’ (Yeats, p.146; referring to Keats’s letter to Richard Woodhouse in 27 Ot. 1818, Letters 1954, p.53; quoted in Anthony Roche, ‘A Reading of Autumn Journal: The Question of Louis MacNeice’s Irishness’, in Text and Context, Autumn 1988, p.79.)
Anglo-Ireland: ‘Most Irish people cannot see Ireland clearly because they are busy grinding axes. Many English people cannot see her clearly because she gives them a tear in the eye […].’ (Poetry of W. B. Yeats, 1941; 1969, p.46; cited in Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1994, p.[8].) Cf., ‘[Ireland is a] bastard out of the West by urban civilisation’ (“Western Landscape”); also, ‘We did but see her passing. / Passing like a patch of sun on the rainy hill / And yet we love her for ever and hate our neighbour ...’ (on Cathleen ni Houlihan, in Autumn Journal, Sect. XVI).
Middle age: ‘This middle stretch of life is bad for poets’; ‘Most Irish People cannot see Ireland clearly because they are busy grinding axes. Many English people cannot see her clearly because she gives them a tear in the eye.’ (Both quoted in Edna Longley, The Living Stream, 1994, p.9.)
Religion: ‘There is, in some quarters an understandable swing back to religion but the revival of religion (with its ordinary connotations) is something that I neither expect nor desire. And after the hand to mouth ethics of nineteenth century liberalism and the inverted and blinkered religion of Marxism and the sentimentality of the cynical Lost Generation - after all that, we need all the senses that we were born with, and one of these is the religion.’ (Quoted Terence Brown, Sceptical Vision, 1972, p.88; cited in Daniel Murphy, Imagination and Religion in Anglo-Irish Literature 1930-1980, Dublin: IAP 1987, [no details], p.126.)
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On mysticism: ‘Mysticism, in the narrow sense, implies a specific experience which is foreign to most poets and most men, but on the other [87] hand it represents an instinct which is a human sine qua non. Both the poet and the “ordinary” man are mystics incidentally and there is a mystical sanction or motivation for all their activities which are not purely utilitarian (possibly, therefore, for all their activities) as it is doubtful whether any one does anything purely for utility.’ (Poetry of W. B. Yeats, 1967 edn., p.16; quoted in Terence Brown, ‘Louis MacNeice’s Ireland’, in Brown & Nicholas Grene, eds., Tradition and Influence in Anglo-Irish Poetry, London: Macmillan 1989, pp.79-96, pp.87-88.)
On poetry: ‘In previous writings about poetry I have offended certain readers because I have grouped the poet with ordinary men and opposed him to the mystic proper. I do not withdraw from this position. I think that human activity begins at a stage below thought with an urge which I can only describe as mystical; at this stage the individual does not distinguish the forces within him from the forces outside him; he does not know what he is driving at and he is not, I suspect, even properly conscious that it is he who is driving at it. The stage of through, on the other hand, is as stage of distinctions and of consciousness of the ego. … The poet shares the paradoxical position of the ordinary man. The paradox is this: man lives by egoism, by making distinctions, but he derives force from a stage below distinctions and he derives his ideals from a stage above them.’ (The Poetry of Yeats, 1941, p.14.) Further: In Modern Poetry I also denied that the poet is properly a mystic and argued that the poetic a normal human activity. I still hold that the poet is a distinct species from the mystic, but I should like to correct the emphasis here … 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.’ (Ibid., p.15; both the foregoing quoted in Daniel Murphy, Imagination and Religion in Anglo-Irish Literature 1930-1980, Dublin: IAP 1987, p129.)
Spiritual goods: ‘Man cannot live by courage, technique, imagination - alone. He has to have a sanction from outside himself. Otherwise his technical achievements, his empires of stocks and shares, his exploitation of power, his sexual conquests, all his apparent inroads on the world outside, are merely the self-assertion, the self-indulgence, of a limited self that whimpers behind the curtains, a spiritual masturbation.’ (Quoted in Gerald Dawe, ’Anatomist of Melancholia: Louis MacNeice’, in Against Piety: Essays in Irish Poetry, Belfast: Lagan Press 1995, pp.82-87, p.85.) ‘Man is essentially weak and he wants power; essentially lonely, he creates familiar daemons, Impossible Shes, and bonds - of race and creed - where no bonds are. He cannot live by bread or Marx alone; he must always be after the Grail.’ (Quoted in Dawe, ibid., p.86.)
Good & Evil: ‘I would venture the generalisation that most of these poems are two-way affairs or at least spiral ones, even in the most evil picture the good things are still there round the corner’. (remarks on The Burning Perch, 1963; quoted in Edna Longley [q. source].)
England/Ireland: ‘I wish one could either live in Ireland or feel oneself in England. It must be one of them ould antinomies.’ (Letter to E. R. Dodds, 31 July 1945; Bodleian MS Eng. Lett., c.465; quoted in part in Jon Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice, 1995, p.342, and in full by Matthew Campbell, ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins and Ireland: ‘at a third / Remove’, in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 1997), p.45; cf. var., ‘If only one could live in Ireland, or feel oneself in England’, as cited in P. J. Kavanagh, Voices in Ireland, 1994, p.9].
The Literary Life? ‘Life is not literary, while literature is not [...] essentially second hand’. (Quoted in Peter McDonald, review of works by John Stallworthy, Times Literary Supplement, 8 Jan. 1999, p.23, with the additional remark that this ‘outrages a number of contemporary pieties.’)
War & Poetry: ‘If the war made nonsense of Yeats’s poetry and of all works that are called “escapist”, it also made nonsense of poetry that professes to be “realist”. My friends had been writing for years about guns and frontiers and factories, about the “facts” of psychology, politics, science, economics, but the fact of war made their writing seem as remote as the pleasure dome in Xanadu. For war spares neither the poetry of Xanadu nor the poetry of pylons.’ (Poetry of W. B. Yeats, pp.17-18; quoted in Edna Longley, ‘Poetry and Politics in Northern Ireland’, in The Crane Bag, 9, 1, 1985, pp.26-40, p.33; rep. as Do., in Poetry in the Wars, Bloodaxe 1986, pp.185-210.)
Crrritics!: “Poetry, the Public, and the Critic” (1949): ‘According to my reviewers, taken collectively [...] I am a weriter they can place quite simply: I am a surprisingly feminine, essentially masculine poet, whose gift is primarily lyrical and basically satirical, swayed by and immune to politics, with and without a religious sense, and I am technically slapdash and technically meticulous, with a predilection for flat and halting and lilting Swinburnian rhytms, and I have a personal and impesonal approach, with a remarkably wide and consistently narrow range, and I have developed a good deal and I have not developed at all.’ (Cited in Liam Harte, review of Kathleen Devine & Alan J. Peacock, ed., Louis MacNeice and his Influence, Colin Smythe 1998, in Irish Studies Review, 6, 3, Dec. 1998, p.343.)
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