Look deep into my eyes

Oct 19th 2006
From The Economist print edition

THIS book gathers together the 15 lectures delivered by Paul Muldoon, a Princeton-based Irish poet, when he was professor of poetry at Oxford University between 1999 and 2004. Mr Muldoon has some distinguished predecessors in the Oxford professorship: Matthew Arnold, Robert Graves, W.H. Auden and Seamus Heaney. Arnold, in particular, wrote with a ponderous gravity—the burdens of high office clearly weighed heavily upon his shoulders.

Mr Muldoon is very different. Disarmingly jaunty, as a lecturer he is much given to self-deflation, teasing and word-play. For all that, he is also committed to the serious business of the close reading and the explication of particular poems, word by word, line by line.

His chosen poems, by W.B. Yeats, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore and others, are printed in full at the beginning of each chapter. They are often long, difficult to take apart, and just as difficult to re-assemble. Muldoon entertains almost as much as he enlightens, an unusual and refreshing approach. He dives into the etymology of words, and then relates these discoveries to far-flung biographical and historical fact. At times, his insights can be acute, at others far-fetched and almost outrageously fanciful. What is more, he is often so closely engaged in peering into the darkest and smallest recesses in pursuit of oddities, that much of the poem remains in total obscurity, so that at its worst his method reads like a parody of textual criticism.

A major thrust of Mr Muldoon's argument is that a poem is not a self-sufficient construct made of words which can stand alone without any knowledge of the biography of its author. Biographical information can be enormously informative, he says, enlightening the reader as to the poet's real preoccupations. But this can be problematic.

Mr Muldoon writes at some length, for example, about the hostility between Ted Hughes and Marianne Moore. He teases out subtle linkages between the two of them, tiny “crypto-currents”, as he calls them, which demonstrate the extent to which the writers were preoccupied by each other, even without being fully aware of it themselves. Mr Muldoon speculates that the title of one of Hughes's early books, “Moortown”, together with some of its subject matter, amount to evidence of the fact that the idea of Marianne Moore was gnawing away at him because the name Moore is “present” in Moortown. As he puts it, this “fact” is “as clear an indicator as one might find of Hughes's desire simultaneously to include and occlude her influence.” Is this ridiculous? Or is it a brilliant aperçu?

Poems are often difficult to understand, but Mr Muldoon's literary method, for all his delightfully readable questings, seems to add hurdles rather than eliminate them. To try to argue that the real meaning of a poem can be discovered only if the reader brings to bear upon it abstruse, quasi-biographical “evidence”, and tiny, washed-up bits of etymological detritus, makes the reading and understanding of poetry into an elitist sport-cum-parlour game, undermining the notion that poetry has a universal appeal. Still, not many books of literary criticism make you laugh.

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