Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal as a Place of Asylum in Space and an Archive in Time

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter sets out to apply Philip Lejeune’s idea that a diary is both a “place of asylum in space” and an “archive in time” (Katherine Durnin, Versa Press, Manoa, 2009 , p. 334) to a reading of Louis MacNeice’s Autumn journal written from August 1938 until the New Year and published with a preamble in 1939. Lejeune interestingly marks that the diary is “virtually unfinishable from the beginning, because there is always a time lived beyond the writing, making it necessary to write anew” (Katherine Durnin, Versa Press, Manoa, 2009 , p. 188). MacNeice did return to his journal 15 years later in 1953 with Autumn sequel. It consists of 26 cantos that contain a number of characters drawn from his personal friends and also “hinged to the autumn of 1953” Louis (Collected poems, Faber and Faber, London, 1979, p. 329). Both Autumn journal and Autumn sequel are defined by the poet as occasional poems. Autumn sequel, however, was not received well by critics. The unfavourable reviews stressed the fact that it “look[ed] back over its shoulder beyond the fire-blackened pit of the war” and that it was a mere “ironic gloss on its predecessor” (in Stallworthy (Louis MacNeice, Faber and Faber, London, 1979, p. 410)). Most critics writing about this powerful personal document seem to agree that Autumn journal caught the spirit of the 30s in Britain as Eliot’s The waste land did for the 20s, and that in its “honesty” and range it can be compared to The prelude (Jon Stallworthy Louis MacNeice: His own changing self, The Web, p. 248). This comparison is also brought to attention by John Powell Ward. In The English line: Poetry of the unpoetic from Wordsworth to Larkin he admits that “MacNeice’s time does not allow him Wordsworth’s tenacious moral grip against his guilts” (Ward John Powell The English line: Poetry of the unpoetic from Wordsworth to Larkin. Macmillan, Hountsmills, 1991, p. 167). Autumn journal’s “unflinchingly personal” meanings and MacNeice’s position of engagement with history, of acceptance of political nature of man not only at times of profound public crisis, make it “one of the few unremittingly good long poems in English” in the twentieth century (Bergonzi Bernard Reading the thirties. Texts and contexts. Macmillan, London, 1978, p. 109).KeywordsPleasure PrincipleVerse FormRepetition CompulsionLyric PoemPoetic StructureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.