Poetry
Autumn Journal
Louis MacNeice · 1939
Synopsis
Autumn 1938. A Greek teacher in London keeps a journal of his weeks while Europe slides towards war. The trees of Primrose Hill are cut down to post anti-aircraft defences there, Munich is signed, he drives voters to the polls for a by-election in Oxford. Between news items come back the ancient Greece of his studies, his Oxford years, a woman who left him, an Ireland he cannot disown. In December, he leaves for besieged Barcelona.
Context
The poem was written from August to December 1938 and published by Faber in May 1939: twenty-four sections of about eighty lines each, in flexible quatrains with alternate rhymes. Its author presented it to Eliot as his best work to date, at once a panorama and a profession of faith, while specifying that it was not strictly a diary. In his prefatory note, he wrote that poetry must above all be honest, and that he had not retouched afterwards the section on Barcelona, written before the fall of the city.
Who it is for
A single long poem; translated in full into French in 2013 by Adolphe Haberer, in a bilingual edition.
Prizes and reception
Eliot judged it excellent; Peter Green ranks it among the great long poems of the twentieth century, and Edna Longley defends it as a high point of the thirties.
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