Book description
The End of the Poem contains the fifteen lectures delivered by Paul
Muldoon as Oxford Professor of Poetry, from 1999 to 2004. Rather than
individual and discrete performances, these lectures form a dazzling
set of variations around the sustained theme of 'the end of the poem'.
Each lecture explores a different sense of an ending: whether a poem
can ever be a free-standing structure, read and written in isolation
from other poems; whether a poem's line-endings are forms of closure
(and where this might leave the poem in prose); whether the poem is
completed only with the reader's act of understanding; whether
revision brings a poem nearer to its ideal ending (when does a poet
know when a poem has come to an end?); what is the right true end of
poetry, and is the end of the poem the beginning of criticism,
including an Arnoldian 'criticism of life'?
Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He read English at
Queen's University, Belfast, and published his first collection of
poems, New Weather, in 1973. He is the author of ten books of poetry,
including Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), for which he received the Pulitzer
Prize for Poetry, and Horse Latitudes (2006). Since 1987 he has lived in
the United States, where he is the Howard G. B. Clark Professor in the
Humanities at Princeton University. From 1999 to 2004 he was Professor
of Poetry at Oxford University. A Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and
Letters award in 1996. Other recent awards include the 1994 T. S. Eliot
Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, and the 2003 Griffin Prize.
