Autumn Journal

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Yeats once said that every poet is more of his time than of his place, and this applies to few poets better than MacNeice. There have been attempts to place him, as if the poet were a refugee standing at an immigration desk. Is he an Ulster poet, an Irish poet, an English poet? In some ways, in the most fundamental ways, he was all of these things. What kind of pumpkin are you going to carve this year? Draw some pictures, along with a description of some pumpkin carving ideas. The Irish poem Autumn Journal was written sometime between August and December 1938. Now, this top Irish poem is about 2000 – 3000 lines long! So I am not going to share all of them with you here. But I do have a selection from it. Write about a dream you had about fall. You could be dreaming about the sounds of leaves falling in a park or you could be dreaming about fall in a forest.

Use this story starter to write a short story: This fall, my favourite holiday is Halloween. I love it because it gives me the chance to dress up, and be anyone I want.Louis MacNeice started writing Autumn Journal in August 1938. Before February 2, he sent T. S. Eliot its completed typescript. Preceded by an introductory note, the poem came out in London in 1939. Unlike some other poets of his generation, who were writing pamphlets and turning their attention to political action, MacNeice was writing a journal. He intended it as a simultaneously public and private form of life writing, a form where a “man writes what he feels at the moment,” and where that scope is extended by “some standards which are not merely personal” ( Collected Poems 101). The UK Government may have recently granted millions in Levelling Up money to Elgin, Western Isles and Argyll & Bute councils, but the Scottish Government and local authorities continue to warn that there is simply not enough cash available to keep the likes of libraries and swimming pools going. The budget and the blame, they say, ultimately lies with Westminster. G.S. Fraser, "Evasive Honesty," in his Vision and Rhetoric (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), pp. 179-192. During fall many animals prepare for Winter. Birds such as the Swallows will migrate south towards southern Africa during autumn to find warmer temperatures. Write a day in a life story of a Swallow preparing with its family to fly south for the winter. What do you look forward to in the winter months? Do you find this time of year easier or harder than the summer?

The intrusion of meditations on Aristotelian concepts is made the basis for criticism of what is happening in the present and also provides the framework of what MacNeice considers the poem should be achieving. It does not strive towards a finished vision but should be a representation of the flux of the present always in motion. This is the justification of his claim in the preface that "It is the nature of this poem to be neither final nor balanced". The repetitive process of time itself thus allows him to trace similar patterns in the poem and to move between past and future while remaining always conscious of the fluid nature of the present.Christopher Armitage and Neil Clark, A Bibliography of the Works of Louis MacNeice (London: Kaye & Ward, 1973). Use the following story starter to write a short story: In autumn, I can escape the hustle and bustle of my summer routine and let my hair down. Who would you most love to share a pumpkin pie and hot chocolate with this year? Why would that make you so happy?

MacNeice, rev. of The Note-Books and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. House, The Criterion, vo (...)When was the last time you went for a walk in nature? Describe it. Where did you go? Who were you with? What did you see? How did you feel? What were you thinking about? Let your imagination run free. How do you like to spend rainy days in the season of fall? Do you enjoy being outside still in the rain or do you prefer to stay cozy at home? Autumn Journal is an autobiographical long poem in twenty-four sections by Louis MacNeice. It was written between August and December 1938, and published as a single volume by Faber and Faber in May 1939. Written in a discursive form, it sets out to record the author's state of mind as the approaching World War II seems more and more inevitable. Fifteen years later, MacNeice attempted a similar personal evaluation of the post-war period in his Autumn Sequel. Write a journal entry about an early autumn evening. You could write about an autumn sunset that was particularly dramatic or a fall sunset that was beautiful.

achievement of Autumn Journal’s was essentially to bring to maturity an "aesthetic sense" implicit in a good deal of thirties poetry rather than to inscribe the headstone over its grave. The tensions between completion and inconclusion, history and time, were all too often found by poets to be disabling. Since Iceland, Auden had moved closer to finding his proper home with "the Just", while MacNeice had provided a triumphant example of the rationale of homelessness without allowing the idea of "home", to lose any of its strength. As the thirties ended, the tension between "communication" and "unity was undiminished for MacNeice, and in this he is true to the most basic of difficulties haunting thirties poets, that of responsibility towards society and responsibility towards form. Whatever its prescription for the individual, Autumn Journal creates a poetic self wide enough to hold these responsibilities in equilibrium, even though the condition of such a balance is that it shall be provisional, subject to time. MacNeice’s late thirties’ work has as one of its poles the Yeatsian need "to hold in a single thought reality and justice" 44, but at the other pole is time’s subtle undercutting of poetry itself. Autumn Journal is the culmination of a way of writing that is, at its best, open to everything around it, part of the larger drama of events from which art cannot be finally distinct; as such, it is perhaps the most representative of all thirties texts. MacNeice as well as his audience had to move on from this exemplary "failure"; as Margot Heinemann has remembered, "the moment of unity passed with 1939" 45. Yet 1939 was also the year in which the time for unity arrived, officially at least, presenting MacNeice with new difficulties and different equations to be solved. Write about autumn as a welcoming time. Think about how autumn could welcome someone new or make someone feel comfortable in a new place. On the one side is concrete living — not just a conglomeration of animals or machines, mere flux, a dissolving hail of data, but a system of individuals determined by their circumstances, a concrete, therefore, of sensuous fact and what we may call "universals"; on the other side is a concrete poet — not just an eye or a heart or a brain or a solar plexus, but the whole man reacting with both intelligence and emotion (which is how we react to anything in ordinary life) to experiences, and on this basis presenting something which is (a) communication, a record, but is also (b) a creation — having a new unity of its own, something in its shape which makes it poetry 12. prayer for the old year, and a prayer in the spirit of the old classic, “If I should die before I wake.” He writes, “Tonight we sleep Cf. Spender’s poem "What I expected" in which stucturat symmetry, and the final image of "the dazz (...)Those who take the whole modern world for their canvas are liable to lapse into journalism,” the poet as critic explains, and yet in Autumn Journal he allows the part of himself that “includes the journalist” ( Poetry 30) to condition the character of his remarkable journal. MacNeice, painfully aware of the “now–time,” nets in abundant successions the excess of the life he lives and observes. He creates catalogues of details linked by the preposition and to accrue in a determined fashion the vastness of history and diversity of life.