Paul Muldoon, The End of the Poem

Paul Muldoon, The End of the Poem (Faber)

This isn't a new book by any means but it is worthy of some consideration after the fact nevertheless.
It is Paul Muldoon's lectures as the Oxford Professor of Poetry a few years ago. In some ways they make a companion set of 'close readings' to Tom Paulin's Secret Life of Poems (see elsewhere here), and just as Paulin will accept that he sometimes 'goes too far', Muldoon also in one place admits he's 'stretching' it a bit. But whereas Paulin concentrates for the most part on sounds and poetic effects, Muldoon's is a wider field of reference, like that of a crossword solver, finding relations and references to other poems and poets as well as in his characteristic play with words. Most readers won't find anywhere near as much in poems as these readers do, will be staggered how much there apparently is to find and then wonder how much of it is really there.
Muldoon begins by reading Yeats' All Souls' Night and in it finds Yeats echoing Keats, as his name does, but goes considerably further and among other discoveries shows that by describing glasses of wine he was thinking of the cork, and in fact, Cork, and associations with Irish history.
We may or may not think it instructive to be shown how Frost's poems involving woods have a hidden anagram, or an almost anagram, with his name in 'forest' but however many times we raise an eyebrow at such ostensibly forced coincidences, we probably accept the ingenuity and informed cross references that seem to imply that, yes, eventually all poems are made of previous poems and form a vast, integrated network rather than a diaspora of discrete works produced in isolation from each other.
Language, and English in particular, is made up of so relatively few vowel and consonant sounds that some linguistic patterning is going to occur whether a poet was trying to create an effect with them or not so all those essays one wrote at school praising the skill of the poet in creating such a masterful tapestry from words were half the time admiring things that any old language throws up on a regular basis. It would be difficult to write anything without some alliteration, assonance or unintended rhyme. Paulin's essays sometimes seemed to benefit from this inevitability but Muldoon's work is on a higher level of association, but one that requires a high level of familiarity with a wide range of poems in order to see them.
I had long thought it was only a happy accident that Stevie Smith's Not Waving but Drowning seemed to contain the unintended joke, 'he always loved larking' in the same way that Larkin himself used his own name in a personal in-joke with a girlfriend called Porter in the line 'porters larking with the mail' in The Whitsun Weddings. But as Muldoon points out (and I had never realized) Smith's poem came after the publication of The Less Deceived and the reference was more likely to be deliberate than accidental. Muldoon's reading of Smith shows her to be a far more terrifying poet than I had thought her poems ever suggested, the subliminal effects being much larger when made real and the desolation that Smith and Larkin share is highlighted by this reading. I must remember not to go back to Hull. And you'll be as surprised as I was that Stevie and Robert Lowell had an intimate occasion in a public place if you are prepared to believe everything suggested here.
The inter-relatedness of poetry is further emphasized by the way that Muldoon's lectures lead off from where the previous one finished in an impressive tour de force exploration of international C20th poetry. Lowell does not come out of it well, despite being acknowledged as a precursor of Heaney, but his translation of Montale's eel poem seems to get the lowest mark in a most instructive comaparison of the many versions of it made in English. The fairly obvious issues involved in translating poetry are made considerably more illuminating by the listing of alternative versions of a few passages where some poets are exposed as rather keener to write a whole new poem of their own compared to the more circumspect renderings of others.
This is a major, wonderful and exemplary set of essays. I don't know why I didn't get myself a copy earlier but I'm glad I did eventually. Muldoon is the paragon critic and reader of a poem, and if I'd already seen evidence of that I'm even surer of it now. The book is full of the best commentary, always entertaining if you like this sort of thing (possibly quite annoying if you don't), and once the brilliant detail has been assimilated the mundane conclusion must be that the effectiveness, the success of any poem depends more, if anything, on the capacity of its reader to elicit meaning or significance than it does on the poet to provide them.