Morag Morris Poetry Lecture 2011

When?

Thursday 6 October 2011, 18:00

Where?

School of Management Lecture Theatre

Open to:

Public, Staff, Students

Speaker:

Rod Mengham

Admission price:

£5, £2 concessions

Tickets:

Tickets are available from the University Box Office: T: 01483 686876, E: boxoffice@surrey.ac.uk

Buy tickets

Two Autumns: Revising MacNeice

18.00    Tea and coffee
18.30    Lecture and readings (readings arranged by the Guildford School of Acting)
19.45    Drinks reception

This lecture will focus on a reading of Louis MacNeice's two long poems, Autumn Journal (1938) and Autumn Sequel (1953).  The second can be seen as revising the first, but the first has a process of revision built into it. The ‘occasional’ nature of the poet’s response to historical events and circumstances means that the overall design of the text is subject toconstant adjustments, and the attempt to grasp the pattern in events turns into an experience of seemingly endless reorientations. The two poems cope with this challenge in related, but different ways. MacNeice can be shown devising subtly, but also decisively, different poetics in response to the unique historical contexts of these two acts of composition; the first in 1938, a time of the end of political hopes with the death of the Spanish Republic and the shame of Munich; the second in 1953, with the symbolic renewal of the coronation but also the death of Dylan Thomas, and with his death the symbolic end of a certain kind of poetry, occasioning a review of the nature and extent of its powers.

Rod Mengham is a reader in Modern English Literature at the University of Cambridge, where he is also Curator of Works of Art at Jesus College.