The Tawdry Halo of the Idle Martyr: Katy Evans-Bush on MacNeice’s Autumn Journal
by Ernie on 12/10/07 at 9:11 am
In this month’s issue of the Contemporary Poetry Review, Katy Evans-Bush takes us back for another look at Louis MacNeice’s classic book-length poem Autumn Journal:
In 1963, after Louis MacNeice’s premature death of pneumonia, Philip Larkin wrote that “his poetry was the poetry of our everyday life, of shop-windows, traffic policemen, ice-cream soda, lawn-mowers, and an uneasy awareness of what the news-boys were shouting . . . he displayed a sophisticated sentimentality about falling leaves and lipsticked cigarette stubs: he could have written the words of ‘These Foolish Things.’” Larkin was a famous jazz buff, so this is not the pejorative it might have been in the hands of a critic like Ian Hamilton, who wrote of MacNeice’s “love of bright particulars,” saying he “loved the surface but lacked the core.”
Louis MacNeice—born a century ago this month and dead these 44 years—typified himself as a poet of the 1930s but also proves to be a poet for our times. To be fair, he was never quite the man of action the fascist (or anti-fascist) era demanded: he could do polemic, but it made him uncomfortable. He needed another way to engage the world around him, and engage he did: he is utterly a poet we imagine lighting a cigarette, catching a movie, arriving at a party. People who knew him may have reported that although he was always in the pub he was not of the pub; that although he was a social creature he always kept himself aloof; but I’m not sure why this should trouble anyone. It’s the condition of the observer/reporter.
As all that may be, MacNeice’s long poem Autumn Journal, which describes daily personal, social, and political life during the decent into the second world war, stands now as possibly his major achievement. His introspective bent gave him a capacity almost unique among his contemporaries for realising how intertwined political, cultural, and personal life are—the most important events still being made up of silly little (“foolish”) things.
Read the rest of the article here.
