The End of the Poem (review)

At about the midpoint of The End of the Poem, Paul Muldoon cites the opinion of Octavio Paz: “In theory, only poets should translate poetry; in practice, poets are rarely good translators. They almost invariably use the foreign poem as a point of departure for their own” (204). Taking a clue from the name of that idea’s originator, just about an octave of pages earlier Muldoon calls translation “a form of criticism” (195), so we could in turn define poetic criticism, when practiced by a poet, as the act of rewriting the poems one reads into one’s own work.

The preceding paragraph offers a diluted taste of the methodology of Paul Muldoon in The End of the Poem, a collection of fifteen lectures delivered during his term from 1999 to 2004 as Oxford Professor of Poetry. Essentially, the reader gets to look over the shoulder of a prominent poet as he reads the works of other writers in order to illuminate the phrase “the end of the poem.” Quite frequently, this entails watching him read from the Oxford English Dictionary, or the Encyclopaedia Britannica, or even R.F. Doolittle’s The Plasma Proteins, as he vaults, seemingly capriciously, from link to link in an ostensibly unending chain of associations, often crossing over his own tracks before inevitably ending up where he started.

Those familiar with Muldoon’s poetry will not be surprised by such digressive tactics, nor by how often they have been enlightened by the excursion, despite finding themselves out of breath and right back where they started. Over the past thirty years, Paul Muldoon has established himself as a poet—perhaps the poet—of blurry borders and quick shifts of discourse. He has himself suggested that this interest in exploring boundaries relates to his personal history—as a poet raised Catholic in Northern Ireland, who has lived in America since 1987—and his output of genre-bending texts plays out such issues of identity by keeping a plenitude of possible meanings in the air at once.

In keeping with his multivalent poetics, Muldoon here addresses the idea of the “end” of the poem in at least fifteen senses, ranging from the logistical (how a reading of a poem can start at the work’s end) to the ontological (how a reader knows we are reading the final version of a poem) to the ideological (how a poem can serve a political purpose or end). His previous collection of lectures, To Ireland, I (2000), explored Irish literary history through an alphabetical structure starting with Amergin and concluding with Zozimus, but in this case Muldoon opts to make individual poems by writers such as W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, W.H. Auden, and Seamus Heaney the points of origin for his flights of association.

Despite his conjecture—introduced three-quarters of the way through the book—that “the tangential is most likely to be on target” (298), even the most open-minded of readers might sometimes object to Muldoon’s associative acrobatics. To return to the idea of capriciousness, Muldoon sometimes acknowledges the fact that his horns are out (perhaps fittingly for a poet who has noted that his name reads backwards as nearly hoodlum). On one occasion, for example, he parenthetically anticipates his potentially skeptical audience: “I know you’re wondering if I have in mind ‘close reading’ or ‘close rodeoing’” (195).

Such a jaundiced readerly eye might indeed be forgiven when Muldoon passes from “masturbates” to “misstressbates” to Katharine Lee Bates, author of “America the Beautiful,” which contains the word amber, which happens to be the first word of the H.D. poem that kicked off the series of links (293). It would likewise be difficult to fault the reader who refuses to endorse Muldoon’s tendency to see verbal roads not taken and what he calls “near versions”—words that resemble, to some degree, other possibly telling words. As an illustration, Muldoon toys with the suggestion...