Information for Dead Poets Live - Autumn Journal at The Coronet, Inner London (Poetry). Autumn Journal, Louis MacNeice's 1938 masterpiece, describes his response to a season of intense anxiety and uncertainty. It's a diary poem, which frets and argues with itself and blends the personal - a love affair, the daily round in London, the leaves falling and Christmas coming - with the overwhelming and terrifying inevitability of an approaching war.