The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures

In The End of the Poem, Paul Muldoon dazzlingly explores a diverse group of poems, from Yeats’s “All Souls’ Night” to Stevie Smith’s “I Remember” to Fernando Pessoa’s “Autopsychography.” Muldoon reminds us that the word “poem” comes, via French, from the Latin and Greek: “a thing made or created.” He asks: Can a poem ever be a free-standing structure, or must it always interface with the whole of its author’s bibliography—and biography? Muldoon explores 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.”

Finally, 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 and deeply learned, The End of the Poem is a vigorous approach to looking at poetry anew.