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

by Wit Pietrzak

Overview

The book offers the first comprehensive study of Paul Muldoon’s mourning verse. Considering not only the celebrated elegies like "Yarrow," "Incantata" or "Sillyhow Stride" but also the elegiac impulse as it develops throughout Muldoon’s entire work, All Will Be Swept Away charts a large swathe of Muldoon’s poetic landscape in order to show the complexity with which he approaches the themes of death and mourning. Using archival material as well as a vast array of theoretical apparatuses, the book unveils the psychological, literary and political undertones in his poetry, all the while attending to the operations of the poetic text: its form, its music and its capacity to console, warn and censure.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781000772302
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/04/2022
Series:	Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Wit Pietrzak is Professor of British and Irish Literature at the Institute of English Studies, University of Łódź, 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