Wandering the Dream City: Memory, Self and the World in <em>Golden Builders</em>

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.