It does not strive towards a finished vision but should be a representation of the flux of the present always in motion.

She notes in her Diary that, despite everything, she wanted to “gather rosebuds while we may” ( Diary 5: 165). But poetry in my opinion must be honest before anything else and I refuse to be 'objective' or clear-cut at the cost of honesty. 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).Auden’s ‘September 1, 1939’, another great English poem of this period, is a poem inspired by Hitler’s invasion of Poland at the start of WWII. Nor am I attempting to offer what so many people now demand from poets--a final verdict or a balanced judgment.

Peter Macdonald has also noted that the overriding mood in the poem is a sense of loss – of youthful illusions, of love, of personal integrity. Steve Ellis, "Dante and Louis MacNeice: A Sequel to the Commedia" in Dante’s Modern Afterlife, Palgrave Macmillan 1998, pp.

The subject of Autumn Journal says, “and I remember” (XVI), activating the storage of his memories, summoning memories with ands and consolidating his memories with ands. Yeats once said that every poet is more of his time than of his place, and this applies to few poets better than MacNeice. In Autumn Journal, the speaker knows that “the dice are loaded / Against the living man” (IX); he anticipates a “harder life” (I) to come, and yet he sees life as always promising complexity and mystery. His answer, accepting the charge, but denying its inevitability is that `there is no reason for thinking that, if you give a chance to people to think or live, the arts of thought or life will become rougher’.

Autumn Journal's design, its forms of language, its molds, its select features of reiterating personal inscription, and its distinctive poetic rhythm of coordinating the grand and the banal, mark the infrastructure of what I posit is a very carefully orchestrated collection.But and finally connects, even forces, the presence of many collecta to sustain one strong collection (cf. A witness, with “no wife, no ivory tower, no funk–hole” (VIII), the diarist in Autumn Journal makes statements about the self, while always focusing his attention on the world outside. Braddock argues convincingly that modernist artworks “themselves resemble collections,” and the collection itself functions as a means to present the modernist work of art to its audience (1–3).

Then, drawing on Manfred Sommer's thinking on collecting, classifying, and creating, the paper engages with a reading of the journal as an archive of a collector, a modern figure who wishes to “fit everything in” (Longley, Introduction xviii); and, thanks to the things he collects, he addresses a pressing set of crises.Because the “I's” assets are so dispersed, their collection and control requires diverse figures of accumulation. You are very welcome to quote up to 100 words from any article posted on Vulpes Libris - as long as you quote accurately, give us due credit and link back to the original post. It also mentions that a number of the characters named there are the pseudonyms of personal friends. That short space of time, that Autumn of the West World, with its fears, its boredom, its impotence, would be captured in Autumn Journal, one of the great English poems of the twentieth century. Autumn Journal covers the period in which it was written, and for its subject matter ranges from the highly personal to the political, taking in reminiscences of MacNeice’s ex-wife, love, suicide, the state of Ireland, pre-war London, ancient philosophy, the class system in Britain, and his visits to Spain as it fell to Franco.