Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal is surely the poem for our times. Written during and after the Munich Crisis of 1938, it is a diary of the delights and torments of ordinary life lived out against the backdrop of encroaching crisis. It captures the flavour of public and privet life intermingling better than any poem I know. Every event seems magnified by the external terror. His dog disappears and he thinks: “This is the end of the old regime”. But then she turns up at the police station and he breathes again.
He catches the lurid mood of the times – “Turn on the purple spotlight, pull out the Vox Humana,/Dig up somebody’s body in a cloakroom trunk”. So like our world.
For people of his time, of course, the worst duly happened a year later: for us the jury of destiny is out. Does he have answers as well as a diagnosis? Yes, he does but you will have to read the poem.
He catches the lurid mood of the times – “Turn on the purple spotlight, pull out the Vox Humana,/Dig up somebody’s body in a cloakroom trunk”. So like our world.
For people of his time, of course, the worst duly happened a year later: for us the jury of destiny is out. Does he have answers as well as a diagnosis? Yes, he does but you will have to read the poem.
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