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This chapter discusses Louis MacNeice's poetics in his Autumn Journal in the light of issues for international relations focused around the Munich Crisis of September 1938. The poet's plea for an impure poetry that can include the complex world around it is held in relation with his emphasis on the organizing role of form. Autumn Journal's rhyming patterns and lineation are related to the political issues addressed so as to argue that both selves and others, and ethics and aesthetics cannot be kept in separate self-sufficient mental compartments.

This chapter discusses Seamus Heaney’s idea of Louis MacNeice as a vital means of holding Ulster, Ireland, and England within the purview of a single imagination. It argues that such an idea, to be accurate, must register MacNeice’s extreme antagonism towards Ulster and Ireland. This antagonism is contextualized within the intense culture of propaganda and rising ideological terror throughout the 1930s. Such a context spurs MacNeice’s interest in the relationship between empiricism and abstraction, which is key to his aesthetics. The chapter traces the multifaceted idea of time in his verse and explores his poetry’s simultaneous striving towards representing newness and registering social reality. Focusing on the figuration and musicality of his poems, the centrality of these to his growing political commitment is discussed, moving into a major interpretation of his masterpiece Autumn Journal. His critical treatment of Ireland is then contextualized within his broader concern for the political agency of poetry in general.

Whereas Auden’s elegies encode what they cannot quite mention, MacNeice’s Autumn Journal confronts the explicit task of “mentioning things,” compiling a documentary record of the fall of 1938 as MacNeice experiences it. From the Munich Crisis to the fall of Valencia, MacNeice’s journal juxtaposes distant events with private crisis, tracing the war’s encroachment on individual voice and slowly acceding to membership in a larger collective, disembodied in the mass cultural form and persistently intrusive sound of news on the wireless. Forced to confront poetry’s conscription as propaganda, MacNeice turns to the proletarian mode of Empsonian pastoral, even as his language reproduces an economic and political crisis happening in real time. Even pastoral, formed classically by the repeated elision of a heroic line, thereby produces epic effects, gathered in the Eliotic figure of a “dying fall.”