Ya consagrado como uno de los poetas más importantes de la década de los treinta gracias a su libro Poems de 1935, MacNeice visita España en dos ocasiones, en 1936 y 1937, durante la Guerra Civil. MacNeice can turn a phrase in a way that I haven't heard in a while, reminding me of some of the nature and observational poetry of the British Romantics (Wordsworth, Coleridge) and American Transcendentalists (Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson).

Robert Skelton detects in the structure of Autumn Journal diverse forms of Celtic, Welsh, and Greek origin (52).Syfy; and the role of the Boy alongside Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg in the feature film Vivarium, which premiered at Cannes Critics’ Week 2019.

Unlike some other poets of his generation, who were writing pamphlets and turning their attention to political action, MacNeice was writing a journal. And thus in patterns like deibide (rhyming stressed with unstressed syllables) or aicill (internal rhyme), he escapes the definite “groove” with more hovering stresses of Irish patterns. The diversity of these positions shows, among other aspects, the composite wide–ranging form and content of the journal as a genre, its instability as well as its capacity to mark with great economy the conjunction of subject, place and moment. In an effort to address the unrepeatable presentness of the now, to escape some false and corrupting sense of identity, the speaker in Autumn Journal departs now and then to Greek but also to relevant Roman exempla of human experience and behavior. Further screen roles include Rob in Normal People directed by Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald; Krypton directed by Metin Hüseyin for DC Ent.

Divided into twenty-four parts, the poem covers MacNeice’s childhood and schooldays; a goodbye to an old love; a visit to Spain in 1936; the Oxford by-election; teaching classics in London. His journal turns to the world of the ordinary and, in the most compressed and perspicacious way, offers itself as a document by an observer perpetually struggling with maintaining and marking off his own life.

Gass persuasively shows that this seemingly unspecific, inessential, indirect, invisible, sloppy, and ordinary word can be found in “regressive–harried circumstances” but also in “child–like speech” (169). Technical facility is never a substitute for substance, and the poem’s honesty in mirroring MacNeice’s bafflement in the face of history leaves the poem empty at the center, brought to a conclusion only by the conventions of the calendar. The intrusion of meditations on Aristotelian concepts is made the basis for criticism of what is happening in the present and also provides the framework of what MacNeice considers the poem should be achieving. This parataxis results in a propulsive synthesizing mode [→page 189] of accretion, patterning, and registration of thoughts, feelings, experiences, and things grasped.MacNeice seems to have changed his attitude towards Ireland, in the second poem “I come from an island…” there is disdain in the images used, whereas the later one he recognizes the inequality of the situation where “the minority always guilty”. Autumn Journal, written over the autumn and winter of 1938, is a long account of his activity in that time, of his recollections and of the approach of war.

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.

Those who take the whole modern world for their canvas are liable to lapse into journalism,” the poet as critic explains, and yet in Autumn Journal he allows the part of himself that “includes the journalist” ( Poetry 30) to condition the character of his remarkable journal. The Sequel came with a prefatory note explaining that this later poem, "though similarly hinged to the autumn of 1953 and so also by its nature occasional, is less so, I think, than its predecessor.