The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures

Description

The End of the Poem contains the fifteen lectures delivered by Paul Muldoon during his tenure as Oxford Professor of Poetry, from 1999 to 2004. Rather than individual and discreet 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 there is an 'end' in 'gender', and if poems have political ends; whether a poem may be completed - as opposed to undone - by the act of translation from one language to another; whether revision brings a poem nearer to its ideal ending (when does a poet know when a poem has come to an end?); finally, 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 1951 in Northern Ireland and educated at the Queen's University of Belfast. Since 1987 he has lived in the U.S.A., where he teaches at Princeton University. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. Paul Muldoon's most recent collections are Hay (1998), Poems 1969-1998 (2001), and Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.