Autumn Journal

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Oxford, isolated and unreal, features as a place “crowding the mantelpiece with gods— / Scaliger, Heinsius, Dindorf, Bentley and Wilamowitz” (XIII). I was aware of it but I haven't read any Louis MacNeice at all, even though I've had a copy of his Collected Poems gathering dust on my shelf for a while. For some contemporaries as well as for later critics, however, the poet's juggling act, his documentary ambition, were not seen as strengths so much as symptoms of the poem's ultimate failure. We aren't in 1938, but there's something familiar in the sense MacNeice eloquently expresses of being in a bad time and watching vast forces push the world in a bad direction while one feels one's own confusion and impotence and watches, bemused, the responses of others.

There's also an of-the-momentness I really like, a sense of modernity in the very special sense that has of the 1930s.In his book Modern Poetry, MacNeice wrote: ‘This book is a plea for impure poetry, that is, the poetry conditioned by the poet’s life and the work around him.

When he went to Spain, his sympathies were with the Republican side, but he joined none of the factions. MacNeice is a serious artist, a classicist with no intention of renouncing high culture, whose solidarity is with humanity.

Thus the section about Barcelona having been written before the fall of Barcelona, I should consider it dishonest to have qualified it retrospectively by my reactions to the later event. The medium MacNeice devised offers a formal synthesis of freedom, formality, and fluidity which allows the poet to “accommodate the total–subject matter of the 1930s” (E.

And for a thousand years they went on talking, Making such apt remarks, A race no longer of heroes but of professors And crooked business men and secretaries and clerks Who turned out dapper little elegiac verses On the ironies of fate, the transience of all Affections, carefully shunning the over-statement But working the dying fall. And compared to some of the other train wrecks of long poems attempted during the 20th Century, this one, though lacking the ambition of something like Paterson or the Cantos, works. Like the very first journals in the English tradition, MacNeice's quotidian and intimate collection is a result of its subject's participation in the public spheres.

It is a mixture of the personal and the public, as MacNeice evokes a lost relationship in a world that is slowly sliding into war. This is a deliberate and directional effect allowing the poet to highlight some instances while deemphasizing others, also to include juxtaposition of series of viewpoints.