1st Edition
“All Will Be Swept Away” Dimensions of Elegy in the Poetry of Paul Muldoon
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.
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
Biography
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.
"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.
