Among the things mentioned in Autumn Journal are details of life in London as it prepares itself for war; the reception of the Munich Agreement (section V); the Oxford by-election fought on the issue of appeasement (section XIV); and visits to Spain during its civil war (sections VI, XXIII). Diario de otoño es un largo poema de estructura diarística dividido en veinticuatro secciones, escrito a finales de 1938. And carries with it the idea of fronting and facing a boundary, edge, or extreme case; it “separates and joins at the same time. The “elastic” and self–contained quatrain rhymed either abac and abcb with irregular lines and repetition of motifs can be said to sustain coherence and cohesiveness.

It does not strive towards a finished vision but should be a representation of the flux of the present always in motion. And Pindar sang the garland of wild olive And Alcibiades lived from hand to mouth Double-crossing Athens, Persia, Sparta, And many died in the city of plague, and many of drouth In Sicilian quarries, and many by the spear and arrow And many more who told their lies too late Caught in the eternal factions and reactions Of the city state. But after initial disappointment that the sequel was not the equal of its predecessor, there is now a tendency to review the work as a valid continuation of the Dantean tradition.The autumn of 1938 was, if you were British, arguably the most frightening moment of the twentieth century. In diaries, such a structure allows to attain simultaneity, a rapid succession, and a sense of exhilaration.

Steve Ellis, "Dante and Louis MacNeice: A Sequel to the Commedia" in Dante’s Modern Afterlife, Palgrave Macmillan 1998, pp.This division gives it a dramatic quality, as different parts of myself (eg the anarchist, the defeatist, the sensual man, the philosopher, the would-be-good citizen) can be given their say in turn . For the one who says, “I not only have many different selves but I am often, as they say, not myself at all” ( Poetry 146), the diary presents psychological and aesthetic possibilities of coordination, communication, and possible transformation of selves. The Sequel came during a slack period in MacNeice’s poetic development and was judged to "lack either the historical or the poetic interest of the earlier poem". An outsider in Ireland, by virtue of religion, an outsider to his own tribe by virtue of politics, MacNeice was an Irish outsider in England, where he spent most of his life, starting at boarding school at seven. I have certain beliefs which, I hope, emerge in the course of it but which I have refused to abstract from the context.