"All Will Be Swept Away": Dimensions of Elegy in the Poetry of Paul Muldoon

by Wit Pietrzak

Overview

The book is the first study of Paul Muldoon's elegiac poetry. It covers virtually all of his elegies, showing how the elegiac attitude has underlain Muldoon's poetic development and shaped his aesthetics and formal developments, as it also demonstrates the extent to which Muldoon's elegies have transformed the genre

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032362373
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/27/2024
Series:	Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Wit Pietrzak is Professor of British and Irish Literature at the Institute of English Studies, University of Lódź, Poland. His main areas of interest are modernist and contemporary Anglophone poetry as well as theory and philosophy of literature. He has published The Critical Thought of W. B. Yeats and numerous essays on contemporary British and Irish poetry.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

List of abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1. Shared worlds, shared voices: the work of empathy in elegies for family and friends

Chapter 2. Vision and revision: paternal elegies

Chapter 3. Poetry and politics in elegies for poets and literati

Chapter 4. Mourning bare life: transnational elegies

Chapter 5. Tradition of defiance: Lamentations

Chapter 6. Between speech and silence: war elegies

Works cited

Index

Editorial Reviews

"This is more than just a book-length study of Muldoon's poetry, it is a book-length study of a poetry of sympathy, grief and death. Pietrzak makes a real contribution to studies of Muldoon's poetry of loss in the context of broader poetic and critical ideas about elegy as a political and psychoanalytical genre. Running throughout the book are close and fully theorised analyses of some of Muldoon's most challenging long poems, which will be invaluable both to the reader new to Muldoon and to longtime enthusiasts. This reader of American and English as well as Irish poetry will find in Pietrzak a critic who engages with the mercurial Muldoon in a style of seriousness, insight and wit."

-Matthew Campbell, Professor of Modern Literature, University of York, UK.

From the Publisher