Close Reading Irish Poets II

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Continuing our close reading series: join Dr Mariah Whelan for two sessions exploring the poetry of Irish poets Paul Muldoon and Eavan Boland.

Paul Muldoon was born in Portadown, County Armagh in 1951. Since the publication of New Weather in 1973, he has widely been viewed as one of Ireland’s finest and most innovative writers. The US Poetry Foundation writes of Muldoon:

Muldoon’s poetry is known for its use of paradox: his poems are playful but serious, elusive but direct, innovative but traditional. He uses traditional verse forms such as the sonnet, ballad, and dramatic monologue, but alters their length and basic structure, and uses rhyme and meter in innovative ways. His work is also notable for its layered use of conceit, allusion, and wit. The cryptic wordplay present in many poems has often been called Joycean, but Muldoon himself has cited lyric poets such as Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, and Louis MacNeice as his major influences.

Muldoon has won a Pulitzer Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize, served as Poetry Editor of The New Yorker and been elected as Professor of Poetry at The University of Oxford.

‘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.’

From ‘Why Brownlee Left’, Paul Muldoon

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Eavan Boland (1944-2020) was born in Dublin. She started publishing poetry when she was still a student, and became one of the most highly respected Irish poets. Her poetry thinks in new ways about the mythology and history of Ireland, and challenges traditional ideas about Irish womanhood. She won the Costa Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award and taught at Stanford University from 1996 until her death in 2020.

I have two daughters.
They are all I ever wanted from the earth.
Or almost all.
I also wanted one piece of ground:
One city trapped by hills. One urban river.
An island in its element.

From ‘The Lost Land’, Eavan Boland

In an interview, Boland commented on her own early days as a poet:

I began to write in an Ireland where the word ‘woman’ and the word ‘poet’ seemed to be in some sort of magnetic opposition to each other. Ireland was a country with a compelling past, and the word ‘woman’ invoked all kinds of images of communality which were thought to be contrary to the life of anarchic individualism invoked by the word ‘poet’ … I wanted to put the life I lived into the poem I wrote. And the life I lived was a woman’s life. And I couldn’t accept the possibility that the life of the woman would not, or could not, be named in the poetry of my own nation.

Two sessions, Sundays, 28 April and 5 May 2024.