Written in a discursive form, it sets out to record the author's state of mind as the approaching World War II seems more and more inevitable.

[1] When the book was published in May 1939, a prefatory note of justification for his subjective and fragmentary approach was provided: I am aware that there are over-statements in this poem – e.g. in the passages dealing with Ireland, the Oxford by-election or my own more private existence.

[3] Its documentary intent is further underlined by the variety of poetic modes and authorial voices assumed as well as echoes of “propaganda films and radio broadcasts”.

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.

[5] As a counterweight MacNeice concludes with admiration for the unbroken spirit of the people of besieged Barcelona, bombed daily and in a state of almost total deprivation, which reproaches his own and the national complacency and self-indulgence.

The intrusion of meditations on Aristotelian concepts is made the basis for criticism of what is happening in the present and also provides the framework of what MacNeice considers the poem should be achieving.

The repetitive process of time itself thus allows him to trace similar patterns in the poem and to move between past and future while remaining always conscious of the fluid nature of the present.

This tension is particularly evident in his decision to visit the besieged Catalan city of Barcelona at the close of 1938 so as to provide his poem with an appropriate finale.

Such critics would argue that MacNeice fails to demonstrate the kind of belief or system he himself thought necessary for great poetry” and substitutes for it only commentary on the process.

[10] The Sequel came with a prefatory note explaining that this later poem, "though similarly hinged to the autumn of 1953 and so also by its nature occasional, is less so, I think, than its predecessor."

MacNeice admits also to "parody echoes of Yeats and William Empson" as well as allusions to older poets – notably to John Skelton’s Speak Parrot.

Judged from the ideal Classical standpoint of Thucydides, to whom reference is often made in the poem, the progressive homogenization of culture and disempowerment of the individual in the post-war Welfare state is the new threat in Britain.

In "arguing for a philosophical and political relativism and agnosticism that contest hierarchy and authority", the Sequel updates that tradition and gives it fresh relevance in a more structured way than had the Journal.