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‘Autumn Journal’ by Louis MacNeice‘Autumn Journal’ by Louis MacNeice
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Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss MacNeice’s 1938 political poem
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In Autumn Journal, written between August and December 1938, Louis MacNeice took many of the ideals shared by other young writers of his time – a desire for relevance, responsiveness and, above all, honesty – and applied them in a way which has few equivalents in English poetry. The diary-style work reflects with ‘documentary vividness’, as Ian Hamilton wrote in 1995, on the international and personal crises swirling around MacNeice in those months.
In this episode from their Close Readings series ‘Political Poems’, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the poem’s lively depiction of the abundance of London life and how its innovative rhyming structure helps to capture the autumnal moment when England was slipping into an unknowable winter.
Listen to this free episode alongside selected pieces from the LRB archive, including Ian Hamilton on a biography of Louis MacNeice, Samuel Hynes on Autumn Journal, John Burnside on icy landscapes, Anne Carson on snow and a poem by Maureen N. McLane.
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Get 25% off a 12-month subscription, including the full series of ‘Political Poems’, when you sign up on Supporting Cast and enter the code AUTUMN25 at checkout.
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Further reading from the LRB archive:
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Ian Hamilton on Jon Stallworthy’s biography of Louis MacNeice
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‘There was too daunting a gap between MacNeice the poet and MacNeice “as we remember him”. Those who had social dealings with MacNeice tended to scratch their heads and remember nothing very much. They spoke of him as a “dark horse” and recalled his lack of warmth, his silences, his impenetrable moods. He was forever in the pub, they’d say, but not really of the pub. He kept himself not just to himself but for himself. For, that’s to say, the poems.’
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Samuel Hynes on Autumn Journal
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‘Autumn Journal is MacNeice’s fullest and finest expression of his dual vision. It is a poem that is stuffed with objects and events, with everything that existed or happened in his life in the autumn of 1938: a personal crisis and an international crisis, an Oxford by-election, air-raid preparations, the slow death of Barcelona. But also with the small particulars of living: pigeons and shop-window shutters and frock-coated statues, the kettle singing and the bacon sizzling and the morning’s first cigarette, “all our trivial daily acts”.’
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John Burnside on icy landscapes
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‘The snow made the world fall quiet and the day appear to stand, if not motionless, then still enough for real time to prevail. The spaces between the houses on our estate became wider and deeper. Ordinary townsfolk, passing by in a snowfall, were rendered strangely magnetic. Gravity altered. When I went out into the snowy street, everyone I met felt like kin. Most important of all, for those of us who defined everything in terms of relative deprivation, public spaces became places that could be shared. As absurd as it might sound, snow granted us a few days, sometimes even weeks, of something that felt like democracy.’
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‘One cold dark night there was a story about a knocking at the outer gate. Despite cries of Yes! Yes! Coming! someone still knocked and the snow that had piled on the gate was blown halfway up the door itself, with no meaning as to the blind knocking or the thick snow or why it did not stop. I knew I should be writing a straightforward story, or even a poem, but I didn’t. I should get back to words, I thought, plain words.’
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