Wandering the Dream City: Memory, Self and the World in Golden Builders

Abstract

This essay begins by examining the relationship between self, place and memory in Vincent Buckley’s Golden Builders sequence and proceeds to make connections with his oeuvre as a whole. In response to the unpredictability of the city, the self cultivates both Keatsian ‘Negative Capability’ and self-discipline. These paired qualities make for a focused attentiveness to the city, to its inhabitants and to the speaker’s own place in the scheme of things as a city-dweller and a poet. Concurring with the location of Buckley’s poetry in the Romantic tradition’s dialogue of self and world, this essay seeks to extend the terms of the discussion by including a consideration of one poem from the sequence in terms of its resemblance to a common Romantic lyric type. It concludes with an assessment of the contribution of personal pronouns to the subject’s self-management, focussing on the use of the second person pronoun.