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The End of the Poem (Oxford Lectures)

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This book is a collection of 15 lectures given by Mr. Paul Muldoon at Oxford England. Each lecture is dedicated to the presentation and analyses of one poem by one poet. All of these are well know favorites: ALL SOULS' NIGHT,W.B. Yeats, THE MOUNTAIN, Robert Frost, POETRY, Marian Moore, DOVER BEACH, Mathew Arnold, etc. Muldoon's presentations are fine samples of inventiveness, good taste, hyperbole, literary allusion, daring defragmentation and impeccable research. The author's innumerable literary allusion and quotation of hundreds of other poetic fragments, turn the book into a poetic potpourri, a "Journey into June" with poetry and poets. Very entertaining.

These fine lectures, given at Oxford over a period of years by Paul Muldoon, are very worthwhile to read now as essays on the art of poetry as used and developed by fifteen different well-known poets, each in his or her own way. For Muldoon's lecture on each poet, he has chosen to focus for analysis on one particular poem by that poet. The text of the chosen poem is the first item presented in each lacture. Muldoon then shows how that poet has made use of a variety of skills to create the poem. Choice of individual words, of figures of speech, of idioms, of phrases, of evocative references to times, places, experiences, and references in this specimen poem to other poems -- all are considered. Muldoon helps his audience to come to an understanding of how each particular poet drew on these elements, and on others, to choose his colors, to spin his own yarn for weaving, and then the pattern, and then to weave the fabric of his particular poem.

The lectures can be read separately, focusing on the work of the poet or poets of one's choice. But the reader will soon discover that in each successive lecture following the first one Muldoon makes reference to some of the points he has made in his earlier lectures. Thus Muldoon is proceeding to make a construct of his own out of the whole of the fifteen lectures. To understand this construct wholly, one must read and think about how each later Muldoon lecture builds upon what Muldoon has presented earlier in the lecture series. Thus, if you think about it, Muldoon has woven this whole piece of work together much in the way that he has shown us a poet builds a poem.

This isn't surprising, for Muldoon remained a poet, hmself, even as he put this series of lectures together. So this lecture series may be viewed as itself being a poetical form of analysis, by Muldoon, of the work of the fifteen poets examined. The lecture series may be considered as a tapestry woven by Muldoon out of the weaving materials he has prepared from what he has found in his analysis of the work of the fifteen poets who are the subjects of his lectures.

These lectures are worth your time to read and to consider.