To Ireland, I (Clarendon Lectures in English Literature) [Hardcover]

Paul Muldoon (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0198184751 | ISBN-13: 978-0198184751 | Publication Date: July 13, 2000

Paul Muldoon, one of the most important poets of his generation, has produced a firework display of scholarship, wit, and intrigue in this idiosyncratic wander through the alphabet of Irish literature. From Beckett and Bowen, through Joyce, MacNeice, Swift, and Yeats, To Ireland, I is a provocative re-reading of the major Irish authors, with a particular emphasis on the continuity of the tradition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

`It is refreshing to read this tricksy collection of four lectures...' Gerald Dawe, Irish Studies

`provocatively learned exegesis.' Florence O'Donoghue, Catholic Herald

`It is refreshing to read this tricksy collection of four lectures...' Gerald Dawe, Irish Times (Dublin) d

`instructive and thoroughly enjoyable work of imagination.' George O'Brien, The Irish Herald, July 2000

`Paul Muldoon is the most original Irish poet of his generation ... a more far-fetched, eye-opening and stimulating survey of Irish literature it would be difficult to imagine. Informal and esoteric, scholarly and playful, the book is both an idiosyncratic encyclopedia and a secret history of unsuspected imaginative tendencies and possibilities.' George O'Brien, The Irish Herald, July 2000

About the Author

Paul Muldoon is Oxford Professor of Poetry and the Howard G. B. Clark Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (July 13, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0198184751
• ISBN-13: 978-0198184751
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,258,541 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great poets are not always great critics, July 31, 2000

By 

Joseph S. O'Leary - See all my reviews

This review is from: To Ireland, I (Clarendon Lectures in English Literature) (Hardcover)

I am bemused and rather disappointed with this book. Muldoon uses intertextual associativeness to generate wonderful poems -- touching, comic, and stylistically breath-taking. Here he uses the same method in a critical rhapsody that links together a galaxy of Irish literary texts and legends, arranged (or disarranged) in alphabetical order. He moves freely and funnily between Gaelic and English, ancient and modern, biographical and textual. The performance is carried off with brio, in a manner that recalls certain experiments in randomness of Roland Barthes. Unfortunately, many of the allusions Muldoon finds are so farfetched as to make one wince as at a bad pun. He circles around Joyce's "The Dead," adding one or two valid observations to what allusion-hunters have already noted, but otherwise sending readers off on a wild goose chase. Unlike Seamus Heaney, who is a great, authoritative, and highly trained literary critic, Muldoon does not project from his distinctive poetic sensibility a capacious literary critical vision. He flogs to death the idea of "conglomewriting" as a distinctively Irish practice, culminating in Finnegans Wake, but he offers little serious reflection on what the literary value of this practice might be. For that one must turn to works like Gerard Genette's Palimpsestes, which offers a careful and thorough examination of the ancient art of intertextual composition. Professorial pedants will find consolation in the thought that poets may need their services after all.