Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature “All Will Be Swept Away

The book is the first study of Paul Muldoon’s elegiac poetry. It covers virtually all of his elegies, showing how the elegiac attitude has underlain Muldoon’s poetic development and shaped his aesthetics and formal developments, as it also demonstrates the extent to which Muldoon’s elegies have transformed the genre 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.