Autumn Journal

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MacNeice was the son of a Church of Ireland (Anglican) cleric who had supported Home Rule in what would become Northern Ireland. Though he barely hints at traumas and is reticent about his family history, he does seem like an “all–rounder” (M. pages , first two pages have been cut , which also means the two corresponding pages , front free has previous owners signature and date.

He tests this principle to its limits in Autumn Journal, where not only the excess, the precipitate of lived days, but also the confusion of “this our world” find their remarkably abundant and disturbing presence. Love life, like a chapter in a book, furnishes the “mind's museum” with elegant but no longer “full and fragrant” “broken jars / That once held wine or perfume” (XIX). To enable personalised advertising (like interest-based ads), we may share your data with our marketing and advertising partners using cookies and other technologies.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.

MacNeice’s politics in Autumn Journal is a broad solidarity: when he drove voters to the polls in the Oxford by-election, it is unthinkable that he would have it done it for anyone other than Labour, but he never joined a party. The ratings/reviews displayed here may not be representative of every listing on this page, or of every review for these listings. The provisional plurality of perspectives in the journal form appeals to MacNeice as do cumulative effects and the option to re–experience how “we find our nature daily or try to find it” ( Collected Poems 63).Committing himself to “the muck and wind of existence” ( Selected Literary Criticism 58), to raw, not pure and intense experience of aesthetes like Walter Pater who attached so much attention to style, MacNeice, while strongly defending formal [→page 200] unity, repudiates the high modernist treatment of form as a basis for telling the truth. Autumn Journal is a long poem written in 1938 , it is a record of the author's intellectual and emotional experience .