Autumn Journal

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He creates catalogues of details linked by the preposition and to accrue in a determined fashion the vastness of history and diversity of life. In the poetry of the 1930s, Martin Dodsworth notices, “addition” is a multifaceted characteristic of the time.

The choice of the topos of boundlessness for the management of the journal designed in verse, always more paratactic than prose, allows gathering of pluralities. And there should be some way of explaining why reading this in a stand alone edition is so much easier and more enjoyable than reading it in the collected. The poem is not, however, intended to fulfill what he identifies as demands of his public: “a final verdict or a balanced judgment. Its appearance on an excellent recent edition of the Backlisted podcast gave me the impetus to get on with it.

It is a mixture of the personal and the public, as MacNeice evokes a lost relationship in a world that is slowly sliding into war. 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.

Gwilym', for example, is Dylan Thomas, a line from one of whose poems is quoted at the end of Canto XVIII. They highlight the most glamorous “fancy lives of the few” (III) or the rare “luxury life” valued by those who live “As if to live were … / But a leap in the dark, a tangent, a stray shot” (XVII).Attentive to this blurring of diaristic and poetic rhythms in Autumn Journal, I propose in the final part of this paper to approach the journal's most problematic aspect, its prevalent additive method of parataxis.