Poetic Emergencies: Senses of Ending in Paul Muldoon’s “Incantata”

Paul Muldoon’s lectures as Professor of Poetry at Oxford demonstrate a sustained interest in how poems might be said to “end”. On several occasions, he returns to Giorgio Agamben’s short essay “The End of the Poem” and its argument that a poem’s conclusion is a kind of “emergency”, a source of anxie...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inEstudios irlandeses Vol. 16; no. 16; pp. 54 - 67
Main Author O'Reilly, James Costello
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published AEDEI 01.03.2021
Asociación Española de Estudios Irlandeses
Subjects
Agamben, Giorgio
Book publishing
elegy
giorgio agamben
incantata
International economic relations
Muldoon, Paul
paul muldoon
poetic form
Yeats, William Butler
United Kingdom
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Paul Muldoon’s lectures as Professor of Poetry at Oxford demonstrate a sustained interest in how poems might be said to “end”. On several occasions, he returns to Giorgio Agamben’s short essay “The End of the Poem” and its argument that a poem’s conclusion is a kind of “emergency”, a source of anxiety for the poem as a whole. This essay proposes that Muldoon’s engagement with Agamben and ideas of ending responds to his own poetic work, and especially to the elegies of his 1994 collection “The Annals of Chile”. The essay offers “Incantata” as an exemplar of Muldoon’s thinking about poetic endings, situating it within the context of modern elegy to show how a poem’s awareness of its own closure can shape its approaches to subject matter, form, and temporality.
ISSN:1699-311X
1699-311X
DOI:10.24162/EI2021-9978