Autobiography poem louis macneice analysis report

Analysis by N. Mohsin Autobiography, by Louis MacNeice In my childhood trees were green And there was plenty to be seen.

This is a haunting poem about the tragic death of the poet's mother, a loss he never fully came to terms with, and one that cast a long shadow over him for the.

Although Louis MacNeice is not one of the major poets of the twentieth century, he is a good poet too often neg- lected by critics whose volumes of.

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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

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A Collection of Selves: Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal

[…] because a diary is like
lacework, a net of tighter or looser links
that contain more empty space than solid parts.

Philippe Lejeune, On Diary

1. Salvaging of Order

Louis MacNeice started writing Autumn Journal in August 1938. Before February 2, he sent T. S. Eliot its completed typescript. Preceded by an introductory note, the poem came out in London in 1939. Unlike some other poets of his generation, who were writing pamphlets and turning their attention to political action, MacNeice was writing a journal. He intended it as a simultaneously public and private form of life writing, a form where a “man writes what he feels at the moment,” and where that scope is extended by “some standards which are not merely personal” (Collected Poems 101).

“I found that I read it through without my interest flagging at any point,” admitted T. S. Eliot, the journal's first recorded critical reader. He praised its “imagery

autobiography poem louis macneice analysis report

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David Sutton

This week’s poem bygd the Irish poet Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) is a kind of balancing act, self-revealing yet reticent, the trauma it turns on evident yet not explicit, controlled and distanced bygd the ballad form, so that without knowledge of the context the reader is like someone looking over the edge of a boat at a nameless shadow moving in the depths below. Awareness of the poet’s childhood circumstances provides most of the answer: his mother died when Louis was seven, having spent her last year in a Dublin nursing home, and Louis obscurely blamed han själv for her death, his birth having been a difficult one. But the import of the refrain remains a little elusive. ‘Come back early or never come’ – fryst vatten Louis talking to himself? To his mother’s shade? Whatever the case, it seems to me, as so often with MacNeice, a poem at once skilful and disturbing.

Note: ‘wore his collar the wrong way round’ – MacNeice’s father was a Protestant minister.

Autobiography