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. blue cloth, 96pp, extremities a bit rubbed, spine a bit darkened, endpapers unevenly toned with some light spotting else a nice copy in a rubbed, spine-sunned, extremity-worn/torn/creased dustjacket. It is a poem written in real time, as world events and one man’s life unfurl on the cusp of winter and war. The diversity of these positions shows, among other aspects, the composite wide–ranging form and content of the journal as a genre, its instability as well as its capacity to mark with great economy the conjunction of subject, place and moment. Digging about online, I found this quote from MacNeice's own 'Modern Poetry: a Personal Essay' from 1937: “I would have a poet able bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.

But not a global film, more like a box office Irish movie that everyone wants to see, well, in this case, read. MacNeice explains that he has not altered anything, he has not qualified any events retrospectively, and he has not turned into abstractions the contents of the beliefs presented in the course of his writing. He comes into contact with big towns like Birmingham, the “hazy city,” and numerous, dispersed small places like Bewdley, Chilterns, Henley, and Nettlebed in the countryside, a modern “dwindling annex to the factory” (XVIII). Apparently it was quite popular in 38 and 39, so maybe readers then did find in it what I was hoping to.Oxford, isolated and unreal, features as a place “crowding the mantelpiece with gods— / Scaliger, Heinsius, Dindorf, Bentley and Wilamowitz” (XIII). Unsettling sequenced juxtapositions of Autumn Journal can allow us to assimilate it within a general model of modernist intertextual collecting. 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. The poem is not, however, intended to fulfill what he identifies as demands of his public: “a final verdict or a balanced judgment. Though they dominate and nicely alternate up to canto XII, abca and abbc also occur and are especially prominent towards the end of the poem.

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). Thus Autumn Journal becomes a receptacle of many more additional meanings clustered around collections of the ordinary, of what depends on inattention and habit, objects with power to be experienced and reexperienced.Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) was "born in Belfast between the mountains and the gantries", but educated in England.

We are safe, though others have crashed the railings Over the river ravine; their wheel-tracks carve the bank But after the event all we can do is argue And count the widening ripples where they sank. Technical facility is never a substitute for substance, and the poem’s honesty in mirroring MacNeice’s bafflement in the face of history leaves the poem empty at the center, brought to a conclusion only by the conventions of the calendar.

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This parataxis results in a propulsive synthesizing mode [→page 189] of accretion, patterning, and registration of thoughts, feelings, experiences, and things grasped.Auden’s ‘September 1, 1939’, another great English poem of this period, is a poem inspired by Hitler’s invasion of Poland at the start of WWII. Poets and critics treat it with caution, as ands can be instrumental in suppressing the movement and vital flow and in evading causality. In XXI, the restlessness of the thoughts of “many regrets” triggers a deployment of many patterns which, like “the radiant cavalcades” of fire evoking life, affirm diversity and chance. Bringing things together, the collector needs to make things stay together, for a collection is always threatened with disintegration (214). Such a collection can be created by one who is not a specialist, who is not interested in becoming an owner, but, as Sommer points out, someone who is interested in “making,” in bringing into being through acts of poiesis.