Autumn Journal is an autobiographical long poem in twenty-four sections by Louis MacNeice. It was written between August and December 1938, and published as a single volume by Faber and Faber in May 1939. Written in a discursive form, it sets out to record the author's state of mind as the approaching World War II seems more and more inevitable. Fifteen years later, MacNeice attempted a similar personal evaluation of the post-war period in his Autumn Sequel.
"There will be time to audit the accounts later" While MacNeice was still revising his long poem, he sent a tentative description of it to T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber for publicity purposes. This mentioned that it was "written from August to December 1938" and contained 24 "sections averaging about 80 lines in length. This division gives it a dramatic quality, as different parts of myself … can be given their say in turn". In addition "it is written throughout in an elastic kind of quatrain. 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". Not only do line-lengths vary there but the writing is rhythmic and avoids an iambic norm. It is, the author thinks, "my best work to date; it is both a panorama and a confession of faith".
When the book was published in May 1939, a prefatory note of justification for his subjective and fragmentary approach was provided:
This approach was in line with the thinking in MacNeice's book-length essay published the year before, Modern Poetry: a personal essay, in which he makes "a plea for impure poetry, that is, for poetry conditioned by the poet's life and the world around him" and asserts that "the poet's first business is mentioning things". Its documentary intent is further underlined by the variety of poetic modes and authorial voices assumed as well as echoes of “propaganda films and radio broadcasts”.
Among the things mentioned in Autumn Journal are details of life in London as it prepares itself for war; the reception of the Munich Agreement (section V); the Oxford by-election fought on the issue of appeasement (section XIV); and visits to Spain during its civil war (sections VI, XXIII). 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. But from such excursions into the past he always returns to the context of the political and personal present. Peter Macdonald has also noted that the overriding mood in the poem is a sense of loss – of youthful illusions, of love, of personal integrity. As a counterweight MacNeice concludes with admiration for the unbroken spirit of the people of besieged Barcelona, bombed daily and in a state of almost total deprivation, which reproaches his own and the national complacency and self-indulgence.
The intrusion of meditations on Aristotelian concepts is made the basis for criticism of what is happening in the present and also provides the framework of what MacNeice considers the poem should be achieving. It does not strive towards a finished vision but should be a representation of the flux of the present always in motion. This is the justification of his claim in the preface that "It is the nature of this poem to be neither final nor balanced". 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.
In his earlier Modern Poetry he had also commented on the Ancient Greek poet's understanding of his role: “It was assumed that life was the source and subject of poetry. And life for the Greeks meant life within a community.” So Why not admit that other people are always Organic to the self, that a monologue Is the death of language and that a single lion Is less himself, or alive, than a dog and another dog? (section XVII)