Jon stallworthy louis macneice autumn
Louis macneice no go...
Last night I went with my two brothers to hear a reading of Louis MacNeice’s great poem “Autumn Journal.” It was read beautifully by the Irish actor Éanna Hardwicke, who had clearly memorised many of the 3000 lines.
The poem was written between August and December 1938, a fraught time in Britain when people despised the government but passionately supported the appeasement of Hitler—because they remembered well the slaughter and horrors of the First World War.
Neville Chamberlain made his “peace in our time” speech on 30 September 1938.
Jon stallworthy louis macneice autumn
Thirty-eight million gas masks were issued in Britain in September 1938, but there weren’t enough for everybody. People were fearful of a poison-gas attack. “Autumn Journal” was published in March 1939.
MacNiece described his poem in a letter to his editor, T S Eliot, as “not strictly a journal but giving the tenor of my intellectual experiences during that period.
It contains rapportage [sic], metaphysics, ethics, lyrical emotion, autobiography