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Autumn Journal on Autumn Journal: 4

September 16, 2020 - By Michael Thurston

(Man Ray, Observatory Time: The Lovers [1936], detail)

Read Part Three here.

“September has come and I wake.”

The calendar turns, and the new month is like a new day. After three beginnings in endings, Louis MacNeice offers a beginning at the beginning. Awakening from the dark night that has hung over the second and third sections of the poem, MacNeice experiences, for the first time in Autumn Journal, as he thinks of the continuity of human being, “joy”: “there will always be people.” Emerging from darkness into the peculiar light of autumn, MacNeice seems at the same time to emerge from solitude into company, not...

Autumn Journal on Autumn Journal: 3

September 8, 2020 - By Michael Thurston

­­(Photo from vinepair.com)

Read Part 2 here. 

“August is nearly over.”

I forget, from year to year, how Autumn Journal begins with an insistence upon endings. Summer is ending in section I, August is ending in section III, and, in the section that falls between those, MacNeice contemplates the ultimate ending. Such emphasis is consonant with the poetic mainstream where autumn is concerned. Even as the season offers the abundance of the harvest, as James Thomson sets his rural clowns to...

Autumn Journal on Autumn Journal: 2

September 1, 2020 - By Michael Thurston

Photo by Chen-Pan Liao (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Read Part 1 here.

“Spider, spider, twisting tight . . .
. . . in the web of night”

Back home in London, Louis MacNeice has trouble sleeping. Section II of Autumn Journal is a nocturnal meditation, a dark night of the soul. Worrying over Being and Becoming, stasis and change, the way day leads on to yet another day, night to just another night, MacNeice suffers both in and from separation, isolation.

Rereading this...

Autumn Journal on Autumn Journal: 1

August 25, 2020 - By Michael Thurston

(Photo: first edition book cover, Faber and Faber, 1939) 

“Close and slow, summer is ending in Hampshire.”

So begins Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal (1939), a poem that recounts the poet’s experience—physical, emotional, intellectual, memorial, associational—during one consequential fall. Between the poem’s opening in August and its conclusion at the turn of the year, Britain concluded the Munich Agreement with Germany, Czechoslovakia fell as a consequence, a Parliamentary bye-election seemed to endorse appeasement, and Barcelona was encircled and embattled by the Nationalists under Franco. During those months, MacNeice taught his usual classics courses at London’s Bedford College (a school for young women),...

A Response to the Literary Address by Min Hyoung Song

August 23, 2020 - By Patricia P. Chu

(Patricia Chu, Photo by Lee B. Ewing)

“When We Look, We See Each Other”:
Thoughts on Asian American Literature in the Twenty-First Century

First, thanks to Lawrence Minh-Bui Davis, Caroline Hong, and Mai-Linh Hong for arranging this gathering and permitting me to take part. For Min, I'm delighted to be here with you discussing our perennial favorite topic, Asian American Literature in the twenty-first century. I feel that we have travelled together from the eighties—when this was a new, unexplored field; when I prowled the stacks at Columbia, New York, and the New York Public Library seeking out the handful of authors mentioned in...