The End of the Poem

by Paul Muldoon

In The End of the Poem , Paul Muldoon, "the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War" ( The Times Literary Supplement ), presents engaging, rigorous, and insightful explorations of a diverse group of poems, from Yeats's "All Souls' Night" to Stevie Smith's "I Remember" to Fernando Pessoa's "Autopsychography." Here Muldoon reminds us that the word "poem" comes, via French, from the Latin and "a thing made or created." He Can a poem ever be a freestanding, discrete structure, or must it always interface with the whole of its author's bibliography--and biography? Muldoon explores the boundlessness, the illimitability, created by influence, what Robert Frost meant when he insisted that "the way to read a poem in prose or verse is in the light of all the other poems ever written." And he writes of the boundaries or borders between writer and reader and the extent to which one determines the role of the other.

At the end, Muldoon returns to the most fruitful, and fraught, aspect of the phrase "the end of the poem": the interpretation that centers on the "aim" or "function" of a poem, and the question of whether or not the end of the poem is the beginning of criticism. Irreverent, deeply learned, often funny, and always stimulating, The End of the Poem is a vigorous and accessible approach to looking at poetry anew.

Genres: Poetry, Criticism, Literary Criticism, Literature, Nonfiction

416 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Born in Northern Ireland, Muldoon currently resides in the US and teaches at Princeton University. He held the chair of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University from 1999 through 2004. In September 2007, Muldoon became the poetry editor of The New Yorker.

Awards:
1992: Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for Madoc: A Mystery
1994: T. S. Eliot Prize for The Annals of Chile
1997: Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry for New Selected Poems 1968–1994
2002: T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) for Moy Sand and Gravel
2003: Griffin Poetry Prize (Canada) for Moy Sand and Gravel
2003: Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Moy Sand and Gravel
2004: American Ireland Fund Literary Award
2004: Aspen Prize
2004: Shakespeare Prize

Reviews

[M. D. Hudson · Rating 1 out of 5]

I stopped reading this one on page 263, but I demand full credit for the whole book because it was such a God-awful slog. Muldoon is an Irish poet crusted with prizes and now the poetry editor for the New Yorker, selecting poems in an inexplicably bizarre fashion (and not selecting mine, damn him). This particular book is prose, consisting of his Oxford Lectures, obviously. Here’s how it works: each lecture consists of Muldoon selecting one particular poem by a famous poet “12 O’clock News” by Eliz. Bishop, “Sea Poppies” by H.D., etc. Muldoon then goes into full critical mode, blithering away with what the jacket blurb describes as “the boundlessness created by influence, what Robert Frost meant when he insisted that “the way to read a poem in prose or verse is in the light of all the other poems ever written.”” Sounds interesting, eh? It is not, trust me. What this all boils down to is a really big book full of a sort of literary Where’s Waldo? approach to poetry, giving Muldoon an opportunity to show off his admittedly vast learning and familiarity with poetry while at the same time allowing him to make a fool out of himself. For example, in Robert Frost’s “The Mountain,” a bunch of space is taken up with Mt. Hor, which sounds like hoar as in hoar frost, as in Robert Frost and so on in an exercise in learned wit that was as relentless as it was pointless, for example, “ice” is used five times in Frost’s famous essay “The Figure a Poem Makes” Muldoon’s learning too often turns to cleverness and an elephantine sort of postmodern “play” that I found insufferable. Admittedly, I had a little over a hundred pages to go on this book before I grumpily tossed it aside, but I never did find out why it was called “the end of the poem,” since I detected nothing of substance about the problem of poetry in contemporary culture (and there is a problem, yes indeed). Note to Heather: I bought this one in Bloomington, dutiful conferee that I was – and I bought it new, which means I paid full price, dammit!

[Diann Blakely]

Though, so far as I know Muldoon has no intention of ending his residence at Princeton or his day job at the NEW YORKER anytime soon, he a few years back reversed directions to become the prestigious Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. The resultant collection of lectures, THE END OF THE POEM, plays on the book's title, inevitably creating from it every conceivable pun. The end of poetry is to commune — not just communicate — with a reader. That reader has the responsibility of listening, and listening well.

***

The joys of re-reading and being free of constraints of journalism's word counts! For a review of Heather Clark's THE GRIEF OF INFLUENCE: SYLVIA PLATH & TED HUGHES (Oxford University Press, 2011), I've been immersed in this book's two initial chapters. Brilliantly interconnected with the book’s initial essay, on Yeats’s “All Souls’ Night,” with “‘The Literary Life’ by Ted Hughes." Muldoon delivers a casually erudite and elegant reading of one of The Birthday Letters's best poems, which, we agree, weren't written in the way Hughes stated but during a far shorter period. Muldoon's reputation for "brilliance," as well as his self-deprecating manner, sometimes obscure his own mastery of close reading; further“more,” one might say, he misses but a single opportunity to spot word-play, allusion, or pun: “fare”/ “fair.”  

“Interconnected” is multiply pertinent here: James Fenton writes about both Moore and Plath in THE STRENGTH OF POETRY: OXFORD LECTURES (FSG, 2001); Clark’s first book concerns the poetic renaissance in Muldoon’s birthplace, Northern Ireland; he too sees Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence as a germinal text for understanding the relationship between the older and famously prim “Miss Moore” and Plath; last, Muldoon concludes with a connection between Hughes and Macbeth, calling the poem "a spell against Marianne Moore."  Quite possibly true, especially given, “like Yeats,” Muldoon writes, “Hughes had a strong interest in numerology ... [and since] this poem has fifty-seven lines,” we’re to think of 1957, the year in which the poem’s “subject first made an impact on Hughes and Plath.” But I think too of Plath, Macbeth, and Toni Saldìvar's SYLVIA PLATH: CONFESSING THE FICTIVE SELF (Peter Lang, 1992), which ends with an appendix of letters from Plath to an American in England studying to be a Jesuit priest; her pleas for blessing as she settles into the London house where Yeats once lived are so eerily like Macbeth's himself that the reader, if not spell-cast, is thoroughly enthralled.

[David Todd · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this book up at the Chicago Publishers Row Lit Fest in June, anxious to see what Paul Muldoon (who I'd never heard of) had to say about poetry. I saw that he included a chapter on Robert Frost, my favorite poet. Alas, I was very disappointed in the book. It consists of chapters drawn from lectures Muldoon gave at Oxford University over a five year period, slightly expanded, I think, and otherwise modified to better suit the print medium.

I've been involved with poetry critique since about 2001, but never with poetry criticism. This book is said to be criticism, but I found it to be more of a description of detailed research done by Muldoon. Chapter 1 begins with analysis of W.B. Yeats' "All Souls' Night". This he tied to several poems of John Keats by analysis of themes, word patterns, even the date on which the poem was written. By the end of the first chapter I was hopelessly bogged down with all these cross references, and knew little about "All Souls' Night" or W.B. Yeats.

The second chapter dealt with a Ted Hughes poem describing a visit he and Sylvia Plath made to Marianne Moore in New York City. In addition to painstaking analysis of the poem—which he was able to tie back to "All Souls' Night"—Muldoon drew from many other Hughes/Plath sources every scrap of writing they wrote about that visit. By the end of this chapter I was even more hopelessly bogged down and ready to quit.

But I skipped the third chapter and went to the fourth, which was on Robert Frost's "The Mountain." This is a blank verse poem that I've written some review articles about, so I was hopeful I'd be able to understand what Muldoon had to say. Unfortunately, I didn't. He tied this poem to seemingly half the poems Frost ever wrote, and seemed fixated on proving it was somehow autobiographical because Frost mentioned winter, which must include frost, and since Frost mentioned frost the poem must be autobiographical. What rubbish.

I stopped reading at that point, and gave the book to a friend, mailing it at greater expense than I paid for it, a friend who knows lit crit and could hopefully make sense out of it. If you like detailed literary criticism laced with lots of opinion, this book is for you. Otherwise, I'm sure you can do better.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Lightsey]

Update: Muldoon really does take "the end of the poem" somewhere. . . or maybe I'm just falling under his spell. At any rate, I'm starting to take this more seriously, particularly after his completely beautiful explication of a Dickinson poem.

Muldoon's bravura readings fit perfectly into my current obsession with how people read. In fact, he follows perfectly after my recent expedition into kabbalah--he's practically a kabbalist of literature, attributing significance, reference, and double meanings to every word he can possibly exploit. He's sometimes absurd (and he knows it), sometimes insightful, and sometimes delightfully off the map.
If I had to respond more seriously (which I don't), I'd say that there's a muddiness to his methods. He doesn't distinguish between subconscious and conscious reference on the part of the poet; he argues a point now on the basis of a word present, now on the basis of one absent; he makes much of the presence of words that are nearly impossible for poets to avoid, like "light". This doesn't stop Muldoon from being convincing in his evocation of the text-packed world of the writer, and I really don't mind the muddiness; it's more fun than your usual lit crit, that's for sure.
My more serious objection is that I'm not sure his method of analysis is uniquely suited to poetry. You could attack more or less any text this way, provided you knew enough about the author's verbal world. Literary writers do interact more with texts than most other people, so their writing will prove more dense in these interactions--but is that the essence of poetry, of art?
However. . . (a) I'm still reading, and Muldoon seems to be developing his argument about "the end of the poem"; (b) I'm reading this mainly to watch a first-class stunt reader in action.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I wasn't particularly keen on many (if not most) of the 15 poems Muldoon discusses in his book of Oxford lectures, I was consistently wowed by his readings of the poems, and sometimes was convinced that a poem I didn't especially like was worth further consideration. He pulls out so many tricks, it's astonishing, clambering between poems and biography and theory and linguistics even when his handholds are shaky. These lectures are worth reading for a few reasons: they demonstrate how one can discuss poems analytically while remaining compelling, they offer a lot of useful information about poetry and poetic history, and they provide insight into Muldoon's own poetic practice/mind.

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Muldoon is smart. Really smart. And his prose style is likable. There's no doubt he knows his poetry and poetic history, and he can close-read a poem like nobody else. But sometimes I found him stretching too far, and I found myself saying "I don't buy it" more than once in his discussions of these great poems.

That said, when he's spot on (and Muldoon is often spot on), the close-readings are insightful, and several of his thoughts on poetry are so well articulated in this book, that for those alone I'm glad I've read this book.

[Garrard Conley · Rating 4 out of 5]

While Muldoon has the misfortune of sharing a book title with Agamben (same year, too), this in-depth analysis of some of my favorite poems is essential. There are times when Muldoon's preoccupation with wordplay and puns can be frustrating, and times when he speaks a little too flippantly of gender , but overall this is an excellent study.

[Jee Koh · Rating 4 out of 5]

These essays are based on the lectures Muldoon gave as Oxford Professor of Poetry. In each essay, he analyzed a single poem, mainly in terms of its diction and imagery, in order to show the poem's associations with other poems and writing by and about the same author, and with the poem's poetic forebears.

I find many of the associations made, in this approach which Muldoon named stunt-reading, persuasive and insightful, though other links seem more tenuous. These less convincing links are usually based on the repetition of very common words. The links may be tenuous but they cannot be disproved, for we know that the poetic imagination works in mysterious associative ways. If Muldoon ends up by making every poet sound like him, perhaps that is partly due to the same imagination at work in writing poetry. Muldoon believes that the poem wants to write itself through the poet.

A believer also in Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence, Muldoon is attuned to the various ways a poem misreads its strong forebear, a misreading at its most hostile in Ted Hughes's attack on Marianne Moore in his poem "The Literary Life." This poetic misreading is often mirrored in a conflicted relationship between the poet and his or her real-life parent, or, in the case of H.D., between the poet and Freud, her analyst. One of the Muldoon's achievements in these essays is to show how many forms that conflict can take.

The first essay looks at "All Souls' Night" by W. B. Yeats, and the last essay looks at three poems, all by Irish poets, Robert Graves, C. Day Lewis and Seamus Heaney. I would not immediately think of the first two as Irish. By opening and closing his lectures series, in Oxford, with Irish bards, Muldoon makes the point that "The English language belongs to us." The quotation comes from Heaney's "The Station Island," a message Heaney puts in the mouth of a tutelary James Joyce.

Between the Irish cover, Muldoon looks at poems by 4 English poets, 6 Americans, and 3 Europeans. No Scot, or Welsh bards, except, in passing, Robert Burns. If Frost looks to Wordsworth, Muldoon emphasizes Ted Hughes's debt to Marianne Moore, and Heaney's debt to Robert Lowell. The twentieth century, from the perspective of these lectures, belonged to the Americans, not only in the political sphere, but also in that of poetry.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

Muldoon picks a lot of unknown or lesser known poems from well-known poets to examine in the lectures, but has a strange methodology. His general thesis is that each poem is an answer or completion of an earlier (sometimes greater) poem. Muldoon then spends a lot of time tracing the possible influences on a specific poem. Very neat if you want to speculate how a poem, gets created, but I can't help but feel cheated by many of the essays. These are great poems from Robert Lowell, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and more, but I never get a sense of the poem itself. Some stories about the historical figure of the author are good, as are the connections made between the poems and their predecessors. But it seems as Muldoon is more interested in showing how much he knows rather than illuminating the poem.

[Simon Harrison · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the worst books I've read.
Muldoon seems to think that Robert Frost using the word frost means much. Marianne Moore and "Moorish" as in Moorish art. Intricacy. Geddit? Really?
Otherwise it reduces poetry to the level of a unsolvable cryptic crossword, that reveals its secrets in a process as dumb as the final round of Ted Rogers' 3-2-1. Complete rubbish. Geddit?

[Sarah W · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ambitious free-form over readings of a selection of poems. Muldoon dives into the lives and works of poets in a way that can be simultaneously frustrating and motivating. I think this book suffered a bit from being adapted from a series of lectures; sometimes Muldoon's sources are less than clear and sometimes his analysis seems slave to a lecture hall time limit. But overall I found it to be thought provoking and enjoyable. Anyone who wouldn't want to sit through an hour lecture on poetry should probably steer clear.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book so far! I love reading lectures. (Forster's Aspects of the Novel is another good collection of lectures.) I am enjoying the close reading and myriad connections Muldoon makes between each poem and several other sources both from within and beyond the same poet's work. I'm finding myself pulling out the dictionary and ancillary books of poetry to "check up" on his suggestions and theories and assertions. It makes me feel like a -- gasp-- academic.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much wierder that you would think. In some ways the connections Muldoon pulls out of the poems are a map of how a poet's writing mind works: at right angles, by sound association, jumping from concrete to abstract to concrete again, and lurching from one dimension to another.

I don't know if has anything provable to say about the poems he looks at, but as roller coaster ride of association, allusions and reference, it's convincing.

[Gemma Mahadeo · Rating 3 out of 5]

If the 'end of the poem' and its significance to reading poems were explained more clearly in the beginning lectures, it would feel more rewarding a read. Fantastic read for poetic obsessives but the general reader might find it a bit of a sado-masochistic slog.
(was 4/5 till last couple of lectures)

[Keisya · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, obviously i don't find this book very enjoyable because i am just a 14 year old. But, this book actually inspired me to write some poem and give ideas how you should write your essays using different techniques! suggesting to all those people whose taking gcse/other exams read this for some inspiration! just read through, no need to read the whole thing.

[Milla · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not quite sure what to make of this. It was interesting, I loved the OED etymologies but parts of it were way too far-fetched for me. Some of his interpretations seem a bit out there. So because Marianne Moore is 'Moorish' and Moorish Art is ornamental and heavy on the arch "it is no wonder that Moore should allude to a golden horseshoe...." Color me baffled.

[Roy Oltmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book about the art of poetry. I haven't read any criticism for quite awhile and I found this book a useful introduction to some poets I haven't read. The chapter on Fernando Pessoa was worth the price of the book alone. (See next book I'm reading) Highly recommended

[Wally · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing analysis of various poems by various poets. Muldoon explores, unfolds, and explicates with grace and clarity.

[Richard]

So far I am loving this even though I am only half through the chapter on Ted Hughes' The Literary Life. This will be one I jump around in.

[Grace Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Significant in my poetry education. Engrossing.

[Layla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muldoon refers to the long version of Marianne Moore's "Poetry" as "the dance mix." Rad.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

4

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

kick-ass poetry essays