I might be wrong, but I think Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Sequel (1954) is a wonderful long poem.
I say I might be wrong, because it feels as though I have most of MacNeice’s admirers against me. Trying to find one who shared my enthusiasm, I instead discovered Conor O’Callaghan in Poetry magazine calling it
Never less than competent but seldom more than terminally dull
Robyn Marsack, meanwhile, in her excellent study The Cave of Making: The Poetry of Louis MacNeice (1982), finds it
An immensely sad work, so laboured over and so little satisfying
and for Edna Longley, in her 1988 student guide to MacNeice, it is “largely… self-parody”.
The final nail in the coffin comes from the frank hammer of W.H. Auden, who made a selection of MacNeice’s poetry in 1964, a few months after his friend died. “Posterity may judge me a fool”, Auden writes in his introduction,
but it seems to me that, in the early nineteen-fifties, Louis MacNeice struck a bad patch […] I would not call the poems from this period bad — like everything he wrote, they are beautifully carpentered — but I do find them a bit dull. Luckily for him and and me, this period did not last long.
That last sentence made me laugh — and I’m not about to call Auden or any of these critics fools: they know their MacNeice better than me. But it feels a heavily comparative judgement, skewed by admiration for different, earlier work.
The general consensus is that Autumn Sequel is not as successful as the book it echoes: Autumn Journal (1939), a deftly-rhymed diary of the dark months of 1938, which saw the victory of Franco in Spain and the appeasement of Hitler at Munich. Autumn Journal is considered a classic: quoted, taught, reprinted, recommended. Autumn Sequel, on the other hand, never made it past a first edition, which hardly sells itself to the casual bookshop browser. MacNeice’s subtitle is, let’s be honest, a turn-off: A Rhetorical Poem in XXVI Cantos. And the opening sentence of the dust jacket copy, written by his publisher, T.S. Eliot, isn’t much more alluring:
The first and most most important test to be applied to any long poem is whether or not one wants to go on reading to the end.
Eliot did have form in being rather downbeat about his authors — and MacNeice in particular — as I noted here:
But in this case, by stating the obvious — that the test of a long poem is whether you want to finish it — Eliot gives me my first reason for saying why I like Autumn Sequel so much: this week, over a couple of evenings, I was surprised to find myself reading it with pleasure from beginning to end.
Surprised, because that wasn’t the plan. I took it down from the shelf after trick-or-treating with my daughter. I remembered it contained a memorable description of Norwich — the medieval English city where I live — on Halloween seventy years ago. Here’s a little bit of that section:
This, I think, is a rich piece of historical poetry. The “broth / of history” might at first seem an unimaginative metaphor, but it’s the ingredients that make it nutritious. As a rhyme, “broth” leads to “calamanco cloth” — from the centuries when Norwich was famous for its woolen textiles — which in turn sets off a staccato ripple of clashing materials (“Cobbles, copper, pewter and blown glass”), that in the next lines takes us into a wild jumbling of the city’s religious and popular culture: the “serpents” are the dragons adopted as a symbol by Norwich’s medieval guilds, and the “canaries” are the caged birds that Protestant refugee weavers brought from the Low Countries to sing to them while working, which later became the symbol of the city’s football team. All of which, mixed with the monuments of “church brass” and the froth of ale, “boil over” — the liquid metaphor returning to life — within sight of a pub sign, ghostly pilgrims, and a local rebel, hanged for treason: Robert Kett. (The last clause here is also a fine example of how MacNeice uses the condensing powers of metonymy — which renames things through their attributes or associations — to intensify his imagery: “night confides / Kett to the hangman’s rope” is a spooky rephrasing of history that removes all humans from the scene except the condemned man).
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