Louis MacNeice's "Autumn Journal"—A Guided Reading Pt.2

Andrew Roycroft reflects on a classic poem.

Read Andrew’s first article here: Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal—A Guided Reading.

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by Andrew Roycroft

Taking up the lute

On 29th November 1938, Louise MacNeice wrote to TS Eliot with details of his forthcoming long poem Autumn Journal for the Faber and Faber spring catalogue. His note is terse and telegraph-like in expression, but the sentiments it shares about the nature and shape of the poem are very helpful to us as readers. MacNeice conceived of the poem as providing a forum for him to share ‘the tenor of my intellectual and emotional experiences’ during the period from August to December 1938. For him, his varied preoccupations could be summarised as ‘reportage, metaphysics, ethics, lyrical emotion, autobiography and nightmare’ and the geographical locations that were included in the piece include ‘Hampshire, Spain, Birmingham, Ireland and especially London’. True to the format of a journal, MacNeice saw the poem’s variety as being key to its success.

Perhaps the most important diversity in the poem is found in MacNeice’s own voice and personality, which he sees the journal as being able to capture. Reflecting on the poem’s structure he states,

“It is written in sections averaging about 80 lines in length. This division gives it a dramatic quality, as different parts of myself (e.g. the anarchist, the defeatist, the sensual man, the philosopher, the would-be-good citizen) can be given their say in turn.”

In his most widely quoted poem, ‘Snow’, MacNeice wrote of ‘the drunkenness of things being various’, and this same whirling world of variety is at work in Autumn Journal. In this article we will listen for just one of MacNeice’s voices: that of the ‘would-be-good citizen’. As we observe his navigation of this role we will also highlight some points of connection between the poet and ourselves, his world and ours, and the possible creative responses we can make in the present moment. 

The place of the poet in troubled times

The age in which Autumn Journal was written and published is at once frighteningly familiar and utterly foreign to us. The fabric of the world was once again being unravelled through war and rumour of war, the old dependencies of peace time and shared democracy were once again on the altar, and the work of the poet was frequently a contested vocation. Renowned MacNeice scholar Edna Longley describes Autumn Journal as ‘an act of imaginative conscience in desert times’ and Seamus Perry’s description of England in autumn 1938 as entering ‘an unknowable winter’ is an emotive but accurate summary of the state of MacNeice’s world at the time.