As part of his deconstruction of Irish criticism, Seamus Deane described two dominant styles in Irish history and letters:

One is “Romantic,” a mode of reading which takes pleasure in the notion that Ireland is a culture enriched by the ambiguity of its relationship to an anachronistic and modernized present. The other is a mode of reading which denies the glamour of this ambiguity and seeks to escape from it into a pluralism of the present. The authors who represent these modes most powerfully are Yeats and Joyce respectively¹.

(Heroic Styles 5)

Of all the poets connected with the increasingly important Ulster Movement, Muldoon most strongly resists the seductions of the Yeatsian idea of a Celtic cultural hegemony. Pursuing and extending the Joycean mode of reading history and culture, he sets his verse in the pluralism of contemporary Ireland, a nation transfigured by cultural invasions from the Continent and, most recently, from North America. As had Joyce before him, Muldoon portrays this pluralism in sexual terms.² Younger by a decade than the others in the Movement—James Simmons, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon—Muldoon confronts contemporary pluralism from the vantage of one who came of age in the late sixties, a confused and confusing era of mass political and cultural upheaval, whose effects can be felt everywhere in his four volumes of verse.³ This period of sea-change also brought poststructuralist deconstruction to its maturity, and it is helpful to read Muldoon's verse against this analytical backdrop of logocentrism and semantic dissemination.⁴ While Seamus Heaney, for example, digs for the origins of a personal voice, for a musical verse “with the aura and authenticity of archaeological finds,” Muldoon wanders about a discordant world that is increasingly inimical to such romantic concerns. In Muldoon's world authentic “finds” are but illusions of meaning, and the romantic “poetry as revelation of the self to the self” (Heaney, “Feeling” 5) is rendered problematic by the anxiety that is fundamental to language per se. It is Muldoon's emphasis upon the logos in a pluralistic, decentered culture, rather than the authentic voice in a romantic register, that most clearly establishes his work's dialectical relation to the more widely recognized strain of Irish poetry, represented at its best by Heaney, John Montague, and Richard Murphy.

A reader would indeed be insensible if he did not immediately see in Muldoon's work his fascination with the word, its promises, its anxieties, its comic differences, features that can be found from New Weather (1973) through Quoof (1983). An early lyric titled “Identities” describes this fascination. The speaker in the poem is a political refugee. At a seaside resort he falls in with a woman, likewise in flight. Her father was a power in the late regime and is now imprisoned somewhere in the interior. The woman proposes a marriage of convenience with the poet as a means of escape to freedom. This exchange of identity will be effected, she claims, by an unnamed friend who will “steal” the necessary papers. The last stanza, however, reveals rather enigmatically that the exchange of identities, however convenient, is finally unrealizable. Left alone after falling into the woman's world, the speaker says: “I have been wandering since, back up the streams / That had once flowed simply one into the other, / One taking the other's name” (Mules and Earlier Poems 19). After his encounter with the woman, the abandoned poet can no longer be confident about identity, about the appropriateness of a name's connection with things. Rather, he must wander back into the interior of the imprisoned father, pointlessly looking for the paternal, prelapsarian origin in a changed landscape where names, like identities of things, are now arbitrary, no longer simply flowing one into the other. This lyric describes the fall, if you will, into a deconstructed world.

“Identities” is also important for a study of Muldoon's poetics since, out of his concern with words and identity sketched here, we can abstract a pattern of narrative situation that informs many of his significant poems. The poet meets a woman who offers him a liberating union through the offices of stolen papers, of words. This proposal, which seems to fail inevitably, is made in the context of the absent father, the embodiment of a past dispensation, whose origins the poet then searches for. In short, the narrative pattern of “Identities” is a template for much of what follows in Muldoon's career. The woman, seen as either mother or lover, is the keeper of duplicitous words while the father, dead or otherwise absent from the scene, is the meaningful center of an old relationship with the natural world, a traditional pastoralism that seems irretrievably lost in the poet's own life, and one that he perforce elegizes.⁵ The origin of this gender-specific dichotomy is seen in “The Mixed Marriage”:

My father was a servant-boy.
When he left school at eight or nine
He took up billhook and loy
To win the ground he would never own.
My mother was the school-mistress,
The world of Castor and Pollux.
There were twins in her own class.
She could never tell which was which.
She had read one volume of Proust,
He knew the cure for farcy.
I flitted between a hole in the hedge
And a room in the Latin Quarter.

(Mules and Earlier Poems 72)

As a child the poet moves between the doubling female world of imaginative literature and the male world of quotidian reality. But the boy's easy passage from one to the other is, alas, the privilege of innocence.

In this maturity the poet of experience confronts a pluralistic world where the immediate relationship with Nature, the presence of meaning epitomized by the life of the father, is conceived only as absence. Why Brownlee Left, a volume about departures and decentered worlds, concludes with “Immram,” a burlesque of the Irish saga Immram Mael Duin (The Voyage of Maeldune). As the narrator charts the journey in search of his father, he takes the reader through an antinatural landscape more violent and forbidding than those depicted in the Irish source. Muldoon has displaced both classical and romantic pastoralism from his poem—panders with mile-long Cadillacs and bestial sex shows have violently displaced the shepherd who benignly retires from his flock to sport with Amaryllis in the shade. In the “Morgue / Of all the cities of America” (42) we see unveiled in urban culture, a cadaver with no distinguishing marks, only numbered streets and boulevards generically named Central and Ocean. Among the various characters encountered by the narrator—pool-sharks, pimps, drug smugglers, and Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Tennyson (Tennyson wrote “The Voyage of Maeldune” in 1879-80)—only one figure seems to approximate the paternal presence he seeks. The virtual image of the patriarch is found in a parodic locus amoenus called the Park Hotel:

He was huddled on an old orthopaedic mattress,
The makings of a skeleton,
Naked but for a pair of draw-string shorts.
His hair was waistlength, as was his beard.
He was covered in bedsores.
He raised one talon.
‘I forgive you,’ he croaked. ‘And I forget.
On your way out, you tell that bastard
To bring me a dish of ice-cream.
I want Baskin-Robbins banana-nut ice-cream.’

(Brownlee 47)

To recall Howard Hughes in his dotage is to give this specter a local habitation and a name. But no positive metaphysical value can be gleaned by the narrator from the wasted entrepreneur and individualist whose intellectual soul is expressed in what is now called a “strong consumer preference.” Thus, at the end of “Immram,” the disconsolate son returns, as he did in “Identities,” to his point of departure:

There was a steady stream of people
That flowed in one direction,
Faster and deeper,
That I would go along with, happily,
As I made my way back, like any other pilgrim,
To Main Street. …

(Brownlee 47)

Muldoon supplements the epic quest for the father with lyrics on the same subject. Although these lyrical treatments may acknowledge the Yeatsian strain, it is an ironic gesture at best, for his lyrics are not “elements of continuity” or “divination,” as Heaney defines poetic authenticity (“Feeling” 41).⁶ In “The Mirror,” for example, a grieving son seeks to finish his dead father's work and is frightened by the man's ghost held captive in a redundantly dead world, in a “monstrous old Victorian mirror” (Quoof 12). The title poem of Muldoon's third volume wonders at the disappearance of Brownlee, a man whose relationship with the earth was especially rich and fruitful. Thus, his abrupt departure is an unnatural act that institutes discontinuity in the once pastoral world:

Why Brownlee left, and where he went,
Is a mystery even now.
For if a man should have been content
It was him; two acres of barley,
One of potatoes, four bullocks,
A milker, a slated farmhouse.
He was last seen going out to plow
On a March morning, bright and early.
By noon Brownlee was famous;
They had found all abandoned, with
The last rig unbroken, his pair of black
Horses, like man and wife,
Shifting their weight from foot to
Foot, and gazing into the future.

(Brownlee 22)

The cause of the father figure's departure is not divined here, but the absence of the paternal center is nonetheless the sine qua non of Muldoon's poetic world, if only because it determines his world's future.

Not only is the father not found by the son, but once departed, the patriarch cannot viably return, a point Muldoon makes in mythic terms in the second section of “Armageddon, Armageddon,” the final poem in Mules. We are given an image of last things in Oisin's return to Ireland after an absence of three centuries.

[the hero] thought nothing of dismounting
From his enchanted steed
To be one again with the mountains,
The bogs and the little fields.
There and then he began to stoop,
His hair, and all his teeth, fell out,
A mildewed belt, a rusted buckle.

(84)

In “The Mixed Marriage” we hear that the father's achievement is the winning of the land; in “Immram” we meet a decrepit billionaire in his retreat at the Park; in “Armageddon” we learn that the result of a heroic return is not the restoration of order effected by Ulysses, but senile disintegration. These archaeological finds—Oisin's belt and buckle—afford little “restoration of culture to itself” (Heaney, “Feeling” 41).

Muldoon's treatment of the absent father is, I think, most suggestive in “Cherish the Ladies,” a recent lyric he punningly calls “my last poem about my father.” While in the midst of presenting a matter-of-fact picture of his father watering his cattle, the poet suggests that such quotidian detail is ill-suited to a modern audience:

In this, my last poem about my father,
there may be time enough
for him to fill their drinking-trough
and run his eye over
his three mooley heifers.
Such a well-worn path,
I know, from here to the galvanized bath.
I know, too, you would rather
I saw behind the hedge to where the pride
of the herd, though not an Irish
bull, would cherish
the ladies with his electric cattle-prod.

As it is, Muldoon says, he must return to the picture of workaday farm chores:

he opens the stand-pipe
and the water scurries along the hose
till it's curled
in the bath. One heifer
may look up
and make a mental note, then put her nose
back to the salt-lick of the world.

(Quoof 25)

Thus, even in an act of memory, in the epitome of the romantic consolatory imagination, the father cannot be reconciled with the son's world of figuration. Indeed, the father so resists metaphoricity that in the last line the poet sublimates the well-known trope from the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5.13) in the quiddity of his father's work. That is, against the stable world of the father, against “the salt-lick of the world,” the son can only posit his unnatural modern world in the conditional mood. In a movement made inevitable from “Identities,” the poet here turns literally and figuratively to the remaining half of the mixed marriage, to the ladies behind the paternal hedge (“Mixed Marriage”) where tropes tease the sexual innuendo from the tools of modern husbandry.

This turn to woman is the second part of the pattern extracted from “Identities.” Given the absence of the father, the poet must turn from the lost, idealized world of unity, where the father knows how to “cure” disorder (“The Mixed Marriage”), to the female world of the imagination, where tropic language promises to restore the poet to the presence of meaning. This dichotomy in Muldoon's verse is a subtle variation on the traditional split in Irish consciousness, one neatly summarized in sectarian terms by Seamus Heaney:

The specifically Irish Catholic blueprint that was laid down when I was growing up has been laid there forever. I think of … the sense that there's some kind of feminine intercession that you can turn to for comfort—this is part of the Irish Catholic thing. … You could say that the Protestants' poem is “Our Father, which art in heaven”—a kind of sturdy negotiation with the boss—whereas the Catholic prayer is “Hail Mary”: “pray for us now and at the hour of our death. Amen.” And so on. Much more supplicatory.

(Kinahan 408-9)

In Muldoon, however, this search for feminine intercession finally leads him not to traditional consolation but to différence. That is, while the poet yearns for unity with the male boss, he wanders in a world of feminine differentiation: while caught in the literary salon, he longs for the hole in the hedge.

As one thinks of Muldoon's volumes of poetry, one is hard pressed to recall a woman there who is not essentially connected with textuality, from the mother who reads Proust, the woman in “Whim” who reads O'Grady's translation of Cuchulain, the girl in “Sky-Woman” whose nether parts form an umlaut in the poet's mind, to “The Girls in the Poolroom” who literally rave about Camus and the twenty-third psalm (it is their nostalgic gesture to the lost pastoral patriarchy). But to fall into the textual realm is to fall from idealized unity into division, into the play of signification and différence. In Muldoon's poetry, there are losses that nothing, let alone words, can restore. In “October 1950” the poet thinks about his origins and begins with a bare statement, whose crudeness shades into adolescent sexual revulsion: “Whatever it is, it comes down to this; / My father's cock / Between my mother's thighs” (Brownlee 9). This description reveals the essential pattern of Muldoon's sexual poetics: the principle of male unity comes down to, falls into female division. Often portrayed as the purveyor of narcotic weeds and psychedelic mushrooms, woman rules over a world of systematic semantic dissemination where male consciousness revels in différence to the limits of hallucinatory dilation (see, for example, “Trance” and “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants” in Quoof).

As intended consolation for the lost father, then, Muldoon's encounters with women are doomed to failure since they embody the division he flees. “Kissing and Telling” charts the distance between expectation and fulfillment:

Or she would turn up The Songs of Leonard Cohen
on the rickety old gramophone.
And you knew by the way she unbound her tresses
and stepped from her William Morris dresses
you might just as well be anyone.
Goat's-milk cheeses, Navajo rugs,
her reading aloud from A Dictionary of Drugs—
she made wine of almost everything.
How many of those she found out on the street
and fetched back to her attic room—
to promise nothing, to take nothing for granted—
how many would hold by the axiom
she would intone as though it were her mantra?
I could name names. I could be indiscreet.

(Quoof 33)

Beginning enigmatically with “Or,” the poem presents a scene that has infinite possible correlations existing outside it, a semantic field that is never saturated. This initial gesture is an acknowledgment of the essential différence inherent in the woman's domain. In a room where drugs are treated as words and vice versa, identity is unstable—“you might just as well be anyone.” Moreover, her axiom—to promise nothing, to take nothing for granted—may have its historical origins in the sexual liberation of the sixties, but it is nonetheless self-canceling. An axiom that denies axioms deconstructs itself, leaving nothing for anyone off the street, save perhaps Jacques Derrida himself, to hold on to. The deconstructed signification of her axiom is a poor mantra, and the poet acknowledges that presence of meaning is deferred here in the conditional predication of his vocation—“I could name names”—and in the punning last sentence, in the doubling of “I could be indiscreet.” After all, it was discretion, literal separateness, that he sought to move beyond.

One can trace the persistence of différence in the playful signification in poems that apparently succeed in recapturing lost unity. In “Promises, Promises” the poet stretches under a tobacco-shed in North Carolina to enjoy a truly modern smoke. While in his marijuana buzz, he muses about the colony Raleigh left behind as he hoisted sail, about the colonists' submerged presence in the genetic pool of the Indians, and finally about a woman he left behind in London:

I am stretched out under the lean-to
Of an old tobacco-shed
On a farm in North Carolina,
When someone or other, warm, naked,
Stirs within my own skeleton
And stands on tip-toe to look out
Over the horizon,
Through the zones, across the ocean.
The cardinal sings from a redbud
For the love of one slender and shy,
The flight after flight of stairs
To her room in Bayswater,
The damson freckle on her throat
That I kissed when we kissed Goodbye.

(Brownlee 25)

This imaginative flight to London is the poet's metaphoric reversal of Raleigh's desertion, but, as in all significant play, the meaning of the return is different from what is intended, and its presence is deferred. Following the différence in Muldoon's metaphors, we see that the return seems punctuated full-stop by her damson freckle, but this mental rendezvous is itself turned into another departure by the last word of farewell.

So far this analysis of Muldoon has brought him to the impasse familiar to those who have but a passing acquaintance with Anglo-American deconstructive literary criticism. We have not moved beyond the kenosis, the self-emptying. There is, however, a form of verifiable transcendence, at least in thought, when one becomes self-conscious that one's perception is not privileged but perspectival.⁷ That Muldoon approaches this transcendence is evidenced by his playful jibes at his own poetics. In “The Girls in the Poolroom” he jocoseriously points to one way through this tangle:

The girls in the poolroom
Were out on their own limbs.
How could I help
But make men of them?

(Mules and Earlier Poems 61)

What the poet proposes here is to literalize a figure of speech; that is, in order to free himself of female différence, he wishes to masculate women.

That the masculation of woman as the restoration of unity is but a fanciful supposition is a point made again in Quoof. On the acknowledgment page Muldoon quotes a passage from Rasmussen's work on the Netsilik Eskimos about a great shaman who transforms herself into a man, but the strategic position of this feat of masculation shows that its realization lies beyond the margins of Muldoon's verse. What is at most possible in the search to restore unity is seen in “Something of a Departure”:

Would you be an angel
And let me rest,
This one last time,
Near that plum-colored beauty spot
Just below your right buttock?
Elizabeth, Elizabeth,
Had words not escaped us both
I would have liked to hear you sing
Farewell to Tarwathie
Or Ramble Away.
Your thigh, your breast,
Your wrist, the ankle
That might yet sprout a wing—
You're altogether as slim
As the chance of our meeting again.
So put your best foot forward
And steady, steady on.
Show me the plum-colored beauty spot
Just below your right buttock,
And take it like a man.

(Brownlee 30)

In an apparent silence, in an apparent freedom from words, Muldoon plays with gender as he plays with genre. As the blazon becomes the prelude to buggery (Elizabeth is to “take it like a man”), the poet seems to move beyond female différence into the realm of literal male unity by approximating a homosexual act. But the masculation of Elizabeth is only apparent because words have not truly escaped the lovers: the scene is heavily dependent upon simile, textual allusions, puns, and double-entendres.

Although “Something of a Departure” may be one of the nastiest valedictions in the language, its playfulness points a way beyond the impasse of division in Muldoon's sexual poetics. As the poet anatomizes the woman, he hints of a desired transformation of Elizabeth into Hermes (“the ankle / That might yet sprout a wing”). This synechdoche describes the possibility of moving beyond female différence. Hermes, the father of Hermaphrodite and Priapus, is a suprasexual god of secrets and revelation as well as the protector of liars, thieves, and swindlers.⁸ Insofar as the poet can associate himself with Hermes he can, like Odysseus, move safely through the hostile and hallucinatory world ruled by women.

We see an example of Muldoon's safe transit in the title poem of Quoof:

How often have I carried our family word
for the hot water bottle
to a strange bed,
as my father would juggle a red-hot half-brick
in an old sock
to his childhood settle.
I have taken it into so many lovely heads
or laid it between us like a sword.
An hotel room in New York City
with a girl who spoke hardly any English,
my hand on her breast
like the smouldering one-off spoor of the yeti
or some other shy beast
that has yet to enter the language.

(17)

Here the poet imitates the actions of his father at a double remove. It is important to note that he doesn't literally repeat those actions. Rather, the likeness rests in a simile, not metaphor: he carries his bed-warmer as his father carried his. The father inhabits his solid, familiar, but irretrievable domain—he juggles the warm brick into the settled world of childhood. The son, however, is in a wanderer's haven with a thrice alien companion—a female New Yorker who doesn't speak much English. The poet achieves a form of contact with the masculine world of his father by separating himself from this redundantly different woman with a unique word, a linguistic element which seemingly defies différence since it refers to one object only. Quoof will not be found in the Dictionary of Drugs, or any other hallucinatory lexicon. This private word separates the two lovers; and, as magical as Hermes' moly plant, quoof allows the poet safe passage through Circean différence. Separated for the moment from his companion, the poet is free to approximate her masculation in the figure of the yeti, the Tibetan man-bear, but he ultimately moves beyond this wish fulfillment in the last simile. In the asexual figure of “some other shy beast / that has yet to enter the language,” the woman as proprietress of words is confronted with a mythical beast who is her own negation. The “rough beast” on its way to Bethlehem frightened Yeats, but that image of apocalypse has been smoothed and softened here. Thus the poet is paradoxically, if momentarily, freed from female différence with the logos of his own devising. The word quoof does allow the poet to reiterate his affinities with the original world of the father. If Muldoon cannot finally keep himself from the different world of a woman's bed and restore himself to the paradise of the paternal field, hermetic prophylaxis will at least assist his safe transition from bed to verse (as a wit once said of Lord Byron).

Muldoon's pluralistic poetics can be seen not only as a reaction against the example of Yeats and his heirs⁹ but also as a direct challenge to the generalized aesthetic approach to poetry that demands the poet create in his work a self-sufficient, autonomous world. There is a frank, central, and self-conscious acknowledgment of the inadequacy of poetry to establish a self-sufficient metaphysical presence in Muldoon's gesture to the shy beast that exists beyond the margin of discourse, beyond tropes and figuration. Thus, when Heaney says of a hermetic puzzle in Mules, “the wrong quest [is] the quest for the poem's relationship to the world outside it” (“The Mixed Marriage” 213), he misses what is most pointed about Muldoon's achievement and what most forcefully displaces him from Heaney's romantic tradition. The clear vision of this extralinguistic world frees Muldoon from the illusion of aesthetic autonomy and safeguards him as he moves through the urban violence, the narcotic distortions, and the anorexia of mass culture that give his poetry its characters, plots, and themes. The hermetic pose of the poet allows him to understand the different world, but not to judge it: the absence of a paternal center determines that his verse will be morally neutral, that like Brownlee's team it will shift from one foot to the other, looking into the future.

This prophylaxis is necessary, for the real world is antithetical to the poet and his “sturdy negotiation with the boss” for his return. At the beginning of “Immram,” one of Muldoon's several Telemachia, the poet is told a central historical truth. In Foster's poolhall, a large black man, literally dressed to kill, smashes the poet over the head with a billiard cue and says, “‘Your old man was an ass-hole. / That makes an ass-hole out of you’” (Brownlee 38). The awareness of poetry's irrelevancy in a second-best, orphaned world, a Foster home, is the foundation of Muldoon's historical consciousness. Muldoon demythologizes poetry's connection with the world of action for reasons that are as pragmatic as they are imperative. It is the real world of the Troubles, international as well as Irish, that threatens the poet, threatens to eradicate his enabling language. Dublin in 1904 was hostile to the aspirations of Stephen Dedalus and Mr. and Mrs. Bloom, but the final word to issue from that drowsy cityscape was “Yes.” Obscured by hallucinogens and wearied by the violence of the IRA and the UDR, Muldoon's vision of cosmopolitan life ends with “‘Huh’” (“The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants,” Quoof 64). This expression of disengagement affords the poet hermetic protection from a culture that moves randomly between apocalyptic and entropic extremes. Without recognizing Muldoon's form of poetic self-preservation, we cannot begin fully to appreciate his increasing importance for the Ulster Movement in particular and for postmodern poetry in general.

Notes

1. Deane has analogous discussions of Irish literature and criticism in “Irish Poetry and Irish Nationalism,” “The Appetites of Gravity,” and “The Literary Myths of the Revival: A Case for Their Abandonment.”

2. Muldoon puts distance between himself and the Yeatsian tradition in his prose as well. In a recent review of Seamus Heaney's Station Island, Muldoon chides Heaney for some anachronistic touches and concludes that Heaney can best serve himself by resisting “the idea that he is the best Irish poet since Yeats” (20).

3. Muldoon won the Eric Gregory Award for his first volume of poetry, New Weather (1973), which was followed by Mules (1977) [both recently reprinted in Mules and Earlier Poems (1986)], Why Brownlee Left (1980), and Quoof (1983). These volumes of Muldoon's poetry are published in the United States by Wake Forest University Press, in Winston-Salem, N.C. Dillon Johnston, editor of the Press, has kindly given his permission to quote from the poetry of Paul Muldoon.

4. It is not necessary to test the worth of Muldoon's poetry by launching it on the meta-Derridean sea. The concepts of logos, différence, presence, absence, and dissemination are those that are most useful with Muldoon's poetry, and their definitions and permutations can be found in Derrida's works passim. A convenient description of the linchpins of deconstruction is found in Derrida xvi-xx.

5. For a cogent account of the broader Irish tradition Muldoon defines himself against, see Bradley 79-96.

6. For readers sired by the modern romantic tradition, one of the most disconcerting features of Muldoon's poetry is its chimerical manipulation of the first person voice. In any one lyric the speaker seems authentic, but the subject matter is often repulsive or inconsistent with another “I” encountered elsewhere in his verse. For example, there are several poems that seemingly treat Muldoon's father in memoriam, although he did not die until 1984. One cannot say that Muldoon creates identifiable masks, for to say what is identifiable about a hermetic narrator (see below, n. 8) is to engage in a contradiction in terms. Muldoon is seeking to move beyond the authentic romantic tradition and the impersonal poetics fathered by Browning and inherited by Pound and Eliot.

7. The implications of this awareness for postmodern poetry and criticism are explored in Harries 87-88.

8. Dillon Johnston analyzes the function of hermetic poetics in Muldoon and Thomas Kinsella. He too argues that the achievement of Muldoon is best seen in terms of hermetic play rather than traditional hermeneutics. Muldoon's hermetic poses have caused reviewers difficulties. Employing the aesthetics of the romantic and Yeatsian tradition, Seamus Heaney calls Muldoon “one of the very best” but nevertheless faults the “hermetic tendency … [that] leads him into puzzles rather than poems” (“The Mixed Marriage” 213). To depreciate Why Brownlee Left David Annwn draws on Heaney's criticism of Theodore Roethke and borrows the phrase “constructs for the inarticulate” (74). Adrian Frazier comes closer to appreciating Muldoon's intentions when he notes that Muldoon's narratives are “based on the idea that a mystery will be solved, that the clues will lead up to an answer on the last page. In fact, on the level of plot, they don't” (133). Frazier neglects to see that the hermetic mystery has been part of Muldoon's enterprise from the outset.

9. Since Muldoon positions himself against the Yeatsian strain in Irish poetry, it is tempting to see him in a Bloomian relationship with his artistic progenitors, especially Seamus Heaney. Mary DeShazer, for one, sees in Why Brownlee Left a search for both “a literal father and a literary ‘precursor,’ that paternal giant whom the young poet must confront and conquer in order to achieve artistic autonomy” (129). Since Muldoon is playfully and self-consciously antithetical, it is perhaps best to view these Oedipal antagonisms from a brighter perspective, to keep Bloom in the bud, as Muldoon does. In his review of Station Island, Muldoon gives singular praise to “Widgeon,” calling it a “small masterpiece” worth quoting in full (20). It is a short lyric least like Heaney's other poems but very much in the Muldoon “hermetic tendency,” and it is indeed dedicated to Muldoon. Throughout this review, Muldoon implicitly acknowledges that Heaney is his major precursor. However, the responsibility for this poetic father is not, as in Bloom's theory, his own; rather, Muldoon places the blame for Heaney's preeminence on Robert Lowell.

Works Cited

Annwn, David. Rev. of Why Brownlee Left by Paul Muldoon. Anglo-Welsh Review 69 (1981): 74-77.

Bradley, Anthony G. “Pastoral in Modern Irish Poetry.” Concerning Poetry 14 (1981): 79-86.

Deane, Seamus. “The Appetites of Gravity.” Sewanee Review 84 (1976): 199-208.

———. Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea. Derry: Field Day, 1984.

———. “Irish Poetry and Irish Nationalism.” Two Decades of Irish Writing. Ed. Douglas Dunn. Cheadle, Cheshire: Carcanet Press, 1975. 4-22

———. “The Literary Myths of the Revival: A Case for Their Abandonment.” Myth and Reality in Irish Literature. Ed. Joseph Ronsley. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfred Laurier UP, 1977. 317-29.

Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. and ed. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.

DeShazer, Mary. Rev. of Selected Poems: 1963-1980 by Michael Longley and Why Brownlee Left by Paul Muldoon. Concerning Poetry 14 (1981): 125-31.

Frazier, Adrian. “Juniper, Otherwise Known: Poems by Paulin and Muldoon.” Eire-Ireland 19 (1984): 123-33.

Harries, Karsten. “Metaphor and Transcendence.” Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 73-90.

Heaney, Seamus. “Feeling into Words.” Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978. New York: Farrar, 1980.

———. “The Mixed Marriage.” Preoccupations.

Johnston, Dillon. “The Go-Between of Recent Irish Poetry.” American Committee for Irish Studies Convention, May 1985.

Kinahan, Frank. “An Interview with Seamus Heaney.” Critical Inquiry 8 (1982): 405-14.

Muldoon, Paul. Mules. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest UP, 1977.

———. Mules and Earlier Poems. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest UP, 1986.

———. New Weather. London: Faber and Faber, 1973.

———. Rev. of Station Island, by Seamus Heaney. London Review of Books 1-14, Nov. 1986: 20.

———. Quoof. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest UP, 1983.

———. Why Brownlee Left. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest UP, 1980.