Write a poem titled ‘Ode to Autumn’. In this poem, you can talk about all the things you love about autumn. What would the wild Autumn version of yourself look like in fall? How would you dress? What would you change about your hair? What would you do? We are all have a wild and free woman in there somewhere….

Make a list of five different items that fall brings to mind. What do these items remind you of? How do they make you feel? Write a letter to a friend that hates the fall season. In this letter, write about some things that make fall a great season, and encourage this person to try out some fun fall activities. Another hazard in modern writing that worried MacNeice was how a balance was to be achieved between the personal view and the tendency towards propaganda in the highly politicised decade of the 1930s. This tension is particularly evident in his decision to visit the besieged Catalan city of Barcelona at the close of 1938 so as to provide his poem with an appropriate finale. The upshot of the visit was the ridiculous incident described in his fragmentary biography, where an encounter with suspicious officials on leaving encapsulates the writer's dilemma:John Cornford, "Full Moon At Tierz: Before The Storming Of Huesca", repr. Understand The Weapon Understand The Wound: selected writings of John Cornford, ed. Galassi, Manchester, 1976, 38. Write a song, titled ‘Autumn Days’. In the song lyrics, you could talk about the various celebrations that happen during Autumn and what you love most about it. course, Autumn Journal has its highlights, vividly evocative sections that have never gone short of praise. However, these cannot really be divorced from the larger structure of the poem without losing a certain amount of weight; without the "hardened mysticism" of MacNeice’s more abstract passages, the charges of "nostalgia" which Hynes makes against the poem have slightly more justification. It should be noticed, however, that for MacNeice abstraction follows experience rather than going in advance of it, so that his philosophizing, if it is that, is drawn from vividly concrete bases. The crucial section, in terms of its "abstract" content, is XVII, directly after MacNeice’s engagement with the Irish version of "home"; the questions posed here go deeply into the poem itself:

A more important prose work from 1938 is Modern Poetry. Several “case-book” chapters record MacNeice’s own development as a poet. The book as a whole offers a defense of modern poetry, in particular the poetry of Auden, Spender, Day Lewis, and MacNeice himself. MacNeice wants to reduce the romantic distinction between the poet and the ordinary man. His poet is concerned with communication, though he is no propagandist but “a blend of the entertainer and the critic or informer.” The poet looks, in fact, rather like MacNeice himself: “I would have a poet able-bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.” Although taken by some at the time as a manifesto for the Auden group’s poetry of social commitment, Modern Poetry treats political beliefs as just one sort of belief which may animate a poet, and it insists that all such beliefs must be disciplined by personal observation. During fall many animals prepare for Winter. Birds such as the Swallows will migrate south towards southern Africa during autumn to find warmer temperatures. Write a day in a life story of a Swallow preparing with its family to fly south for the winter. Write a short story titled “A Good Night”. In this story, you can write about a night of going to the lake for a rowboat ride, or you can write about a night in the forest with a bonfire. MacNeice, "Subject in Modern Poetry", Essays and Studies, 1936, [1937], 149, repr. Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice, ed. A. Heuser, Oxford, 1987, 65, [cited hereafter as Heuser]. As the personal, so the public accounts of the year appear problematic: “The year has little to show, will have a heavy / Overdraft to its heir” (XVIII). Like the first journals of antiquity, Autumn Journal records in a form of an account book the climate of the “needs of commerce and administration.” Lejeune says that “up until the sixteenth century, the journal was basically a community affair” (52). Here is its thirties version: International betrayals, public murder,

Yeats once said that every poet is more of his time than of his place, and this applies to few poets better than MacNeice. There have been attempts to place him, as if the poet were a refugee standing at an immigration desk. Is he an Ulster poet, an Irish poet, an English poet? In some ways, in the most fundamental ways, he was all of these things. Louis MacNeice was widely regarded in the 1930s as a junior member of the Auden-Spender-Day Lewis group: MacNeice and Stephen Spender were contemporaries and friends at Oxford, serving as joint editors of Oxford Poetry, 1929. MacNeice became a friend of W.H. Auden’s and collaborated with him on Letters from Iceland (1937). And in Modern Poetry (1938), MacNeice provided the best critical statement of the poetic aims and achievements of his friends. Despite these personal and professional ties, MacNeice did not share the ideological commitments of the “Auden group.” From first to last, his own work reflects a melancholy skepticism too honest to give final assent to any fixed system. MacNeice might sympathize with, and even envy, those who believed, but he remained a detached outsider.

MacNeice himself does not quite load his poem with aspirations to "a perfection which can never come", he does propose a dénouement for the problems of self and other in society which, as Edna Longley points out, "may seem impossibly poetic" 43. The poem’s method forces MacNeice to go further in the way of self-criticism than he had gone before, in poetry at least: the "archaizer and dilettante", the "fake individuals", of I Crossed the Minch, come through as aspects of the voices of Autumn Journal, whether as "impresario of the ancient Greeks" or the hedonistic connoisseur of "Shelley and jazz and lieder and love and hymn-tunes". The analysis of Irish violence and atrophy, too, carries the liabilities of being both part of the problem and disowning it. The prayers that compensate for the poem’s negative, or at least self-lacerating aspects, are necessary if only to even the balance. In Barcelona, for instance: Autumn Journal is an autobiographical long poem in twenty-four sections by Louis MacNeice. It was written between August and December 1938, and published as a single volume by Faber and Faber in May 1939. Written in a discursive form, it sets out to record the author's state of mind as the approaching World War II seems more and more inevitable. Fifteen years later, MacNeice attempted a similar personal evaluation of the post-war period in his Autumn Sequel. What is your favorite thing about the changing seasons? Why are these shifts so important in our hectic, modern lives? Following Manfred Sommer, we can say that MacNeice's journal is not a mere subjective gathering of experiences, a product of spontaneous interferences, but a collection, which Sommer always understands as a complete form, a nuanced, conscious, and aesthetically consolidated accumulation. Such a collection can be created by one who is not a specialist, who is not interested in becoming an owner, but, as Sommer points out, someone who is interested in “making,” in bringing into being through acts of poiesis. The collector gives form; he is a poet (cf. Sommer 206).Make a top ten list of your favourite activities over the fall season. For each activity write down a sentence to explain why this activity is your favourite. How do you feel at the end of Summer and shift into Autumn? Is it hard to say goodbye or do you look forward to cooler weather?

Do you feel more emotional during Autumn? Maybe you feel some Autumn Anxiety. Why do you think this happens?Write a story, poem or song about walking through a forest first thing in the morning in fall. Be as descriptive as you can. I think it is my best work to date; it is both a panorama and a confession of faith. ( Letters 312)