Autumn Journal

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Divided into twenty-four parts, the poem covers MacNeice’s childhood and schooldays; a goodbye to an old love; a visit to Spain in 1936; the Oxford by-election; teaching classics in London. I bought this book on a whim due to its gorgeous cover, and I was pleasantly surprised by some stream-of-consciousness poetry (written from August to December 1938) that reminded me of Hope Mirrlees' "Paris: A Poem" with some instants that smacked of T. I have certain beliefs which, I hope, emerge in the course of it but which I have refused to abstract from the context. There are familiar devils, “the flowery orator in the heart” (XIX); there are familiar haunting bogeys: “horrible, stiff / people with blank faces” (XV).

A Soundly Bound Book, Previous Owner's 1948 Name On Endpaper, Some Cover-Wear But Otherwise Undamaged.

Intermixed with these more or less public and political events are more personal themes: memories of his schooldays (section X); of teaching in Birmingham (section VIII); of his broken marriage and subsequent love affair with Nancy Coldstream; denunciation of both sides of divided Ireland (section XVI); the poetry and philosophy of his academic subject, Ancient Greece. He was most recently seen in the BBC1 drama The Sixth Commandment written by Sarah Phelps, alongside Timothy Spall and Anne Reid, and the feature film Lakelands directed by Robert Higgins and Patrick McGivney, in which he plays the lead role of Cian opposite Danielle Galligan. I tend not to like prose poems, but this book offers a nice halfway house between complete sentences and a stanza form, and it voices the kinds of feelings we can all relate to. That short space of time, that Autumn of the West World, with its fears, its boredom, its impotence, would be captured in Autumn Journal, one of the great English poems of the twentieth century.

Autumn Journal' is a much admired volume of poems by Louis MacNeice, the acclaimed Irish poet and playwright. The atmosphere of the impending war, being in love on the streets of London, musings on Spanish civil war and ancient Greek hedonists, the courage of ordinary people going to work every day "to build the falling castle". First edition, first impression; 8vo; light age-toning to text block, else unmarked internally; publisher's russet cloth, gilt lettering to spine, slight rubbing to extremities, with the unclipped dust-jacket, some chips and tears, minor loss to spine ends, rear panel soiled, else very good. In his opening Note, written in March 1939, he says; “It is the nature of this poem to be neither final nor balanced.Steve Ellis, "Dante and Louis MacNeice: A Sequel to the Commedia" in Dante’s Modern Afterlife, Palgrave Macmillan 1998, pp. It was written between August and December 1938, and published as a single volume by Faber and Faber in May 1939.

Nor am I attempting to offer what so many people now demand from poets--a final verdict or a balanced judgment. I discovered Louis Macneice in my 30s … and it’s interesting that Michael has quoted one of his lines that really lodged in my brain then … the one about his fellow countrymen being like drayhorses and dragging their ruin behind them. It is October, / The year-god dying on the destined pyre / With all the colours of a scrambled sunset / And all the funeral elegance of fire" (38). The speaker of Autumn Journal is both a witness and an ordinary “man–about–town,” who always assumes a sympathetic audience, and who accommodates to his sense of their presence.

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.

This division gives it a dramatic quality, as different parts of myself (eg the anarchist, the defeatist, the sensual man, the philosopher, the would-be-good citizen) can be given their say in turn . The critic welcomes the reading of the “valedictory strain” of late modernists in the large contexts of “audience and market forces, cultures and history, and biography” (851). Youtube: Rare short film from Loopline's TV series 'Imprint' presented by Theo Dorgan was aired on RTE 1999. He reflects on a love lost but whose presence he has yet to disentangle from his memories and images of the London streets with lines understatedly beautiful but somehow powerful and haunting. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions.Autumn Journal covers the period in which it was written, and for its subject matter ranges from the highly personal to the political, taking in reminiscences of MacNeice’s ex-wife, love, suicide, the state of Ireland, pre-war London, ancient philosophy, the class system in Britain, and his visits to Spain as it fell to Franco. YOU CAN GET THIS OLD RARE BOOK AS GIVEN IN THE FIRST IMAGE OF LEATHER BINDING ONLY AGAINST REQUEST WITHOUT EXTRA CHARGES. This form (a) gives the whole poem a formal unity but (b) saves it from monotony by allowing it a great range of appropriate variations.