The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures Book

Muldoon loves to follow definition and etymology into places where no one else has ever ventured. The main reference in this book is the Oxford English Dictionary, and I doubt if there are more than two pages that go by without some reference to it. He can call it close reading, but it often just feels silly -- particularly if a reader is looking for the interpretation of a particular poem. Muldoon sets up that expectation, starting each essay with a poem and a very good poem, but he usually is much more interested in the places Paul Muldoon's imagination takes him.

He will fall back on standard interpretative formulae -- Freud, for instance, in addition to a deconstructionist's associations. For Muldoon, Frost and Moore and Day-Lewis for instance couldn't use frost or more or day without evoking their names. And all of that can get very tedious.

But in those moments when he moves past his intellectual showiness, his efforts to show the places his brain can take him, and actually talk about the poem at hand, he can actually say some brilliant and important things. I really did enjoy his readings of Lowell's "George III," H.D.'s "Sea Poppies," and Tsvetayeva's "Poem of the End." And sometimes when he allowed himself to do some biographical criticism, I was completely intrigued.

In the end, I can't deny or denigrate his absolute love for the process of the poem. At the very depth of his being he believes this art is important -- and this is a belief I find most clearly and consistently in Irish poets. They seem to have overcome the ironic dismissal of the art that is often voiced even by dedicated practitioners of it. And he has that sense that the poem can transcend the poet. In his last essay he writes " The notion that a poet might 'know more that he spoke of' is connected ... with the idea that the poem ... might 'know more' than the poet." And that's an idea that seems absolutely central to my understanding of the art. All of Muldoon's trips far into etymology can illustrate this point, and, finally, become more helpful.