Autumn Journal

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It is a record of the author's emotional and intellectual experience during those months, the trivia of everyday living set against the events of the world outside, the settlement in Munich and slow defeat in Spain. Singled out by MacNeice to add and compile his dailiness, it seems fitting that the meanings of and and its disturbing presence will designate a very kinetic collection.

It offers not a dialogue with modernist forms but a striking point of departure for the late modernist 8) poetics of reopening “the modernist enclosure of form onto the work's social and political environs” (Miller 20).Among the things mentioned in Autumn Journal are details of life in London as it prepares itself for war; the reception of the Munich Agreement (section V); the Oxford by-election fought on the issue of appeasement (section XIV); and visits to Spain during its civil war (sections VI, XXIII). There have been attempts to place him, as if the poet were a refugee standing at an immigration desk. The autumn of 1938 was, if you were British, arguably the most frightening moment of the twentieth century. Nor am I attempting to offer what so many people now demand from poets – a final verdict or a balanced judgment. 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.

Deceptively simple poetry that intertwines personal upheaval with the political instability of Europe in 1938. Its documentary intent is further underlined by the variety of poetic modes and authorial voices assumed as well as echoes of “propaganda films and radio broadcasts”. Described as representing the Thirties in the way the 'The Wasteland' did the Twenties and like a lot of poems from that decade oddly caught in its own stylistic time bubble in a way the Waste Land never was. In an effort to address the unrepeatable presentness of the now, to escape some false and corrupting sense of identity, the speaker in Autumn Journal departs now and then to Greek but also to relevant Roman exempla of human experience and behavior.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. I have certain beliefs which, I hope, emerge in the course of it but which I have refused to abstract from their context.