How smart do you like your poets? Professorial, obscure, furnishing explanations as long as their beards? Or more endearing for being slightly daft, ingenuous as children? Or unabashedly well-read, lording their eclectic tastes over readers' heads? Put another way, could you call it "smart" to rhyme "Eisenhower" with "horsepower," "horse dung" with "Aqua-Lung," "barbecue" with "cockatoo"; to play on the alliteration of "ghastly" and "gasoline," "paltry" and "poltroon"; to write a poem in which the words "egg" and "hush-hush" appear in alternating stanzas; to address an elegy to Warren Zevon in which appears the line, "Two graves must hide, Warren, thine and mine corse"; to begin and end three consecutive sonnets with the phrase, "At least they weren't speaking French"?

Better to begin elsewhere.

How smart do you like your critics? Paul Muldoon's five-year stint as Professor of Poetry at Oxford has culminated in The End of the Poem, one of the strangest concoctions of smarts one is likely ever to encounter. In its formal design the book is the epitome of clarity, comprising fifteen lectures, each taking as its ostensible subject a single poem by a single poet (save the last, which admits to discussing three) and using that subject to throw light on some facet of the phrase the end (or "aim") of the poem. In fact, the focus is not nearly so sharp—nearly every chapter ranges too far afield to return home again, while those that do return collapse exhausted on the doormat. And despite a continual good-faith effort to spell out in humble, declarative sentences his intended itinerary—"I want to try today to explore, albeit obliquely..."—he has an equal and opposite knack for ditching all intention and following instead the vagaries of his thought as it feints and burrows toward some invisible pole. Perhaps Muldoon wrote the introduction to each lecture before its body, guessing rather than foretelling what course it would take; or perhaps, even afterward, knowing that course, he still could not bring himself to circumscribe its progress. "The poem, like the soul, has a concupiscence for becoming all it might."

Muldoon's method of close reading leans most heavily on two productive tools: far-fetched hypothesizing—biographical, historical, and literary—and when that is not readily available, his own ear's free association. These two engines drive the lectures in the following way. First, they assemble a critical mass of texts that have some linguistic or thematic tie to the poem slated for discussion. Dictionary entries, newspaper articles contemporary with the poem's composition, any literature the poet might have read, later reviews or translations of the poem—all are fair game, all go into the pot. Once the ingredients are assembled, Muldoon provides the heat, confecting, conflating, stirring them together until poem, poet, and critic disappear into the steam and aroma of the enterprise. His reading of Emily Dickinson's "I tried to think a lonelier thing," for instance, prints all or a portion of nineteen other Dickinson poems, some of which he analyzes in great detail. Each lecture reaches a point of saturation, when so many texts are swirling about the reader's head that Muldoon dons them like an invisibility cloak, speaking entirely in other people's words. From his chapter on H.D.'s "Sea Poppies": "Indulge me, if you will, in a few more 'spiral-like meanderings' of my own as I try to 'grasp' 'the edge of the sand-hill'..."

Lest the whole thing seem too mysterious, rest assured that he connects one text to another in an extremely old-fashioned and transparent way—word by word. With a classicist's devotion to the concordance and a poet's faith in the boundlessly retentive memories of poets, he leaves open the possibility that any two poems with diction in common may be alluding to each other, or may spring from common ancestry. The number of connections to be made, then, is nearly infinite, and Muldoon seems to found his arguments consistently on the least likely of those connections. A couple examples: In his discussion of H.D.'s poem "Sea Poppies" he attributes the use of the word "amber" to Keats's image of "the last oozings" of the cider-press in "To Autumn." The two textual degrees of separation are 1) the Encyclopedia Britannica, which describes amber as a sort of gum, and 2) the Poet's speech in Timon of Athens : "Our poesy is as a gum which oozes from whence 'tis nourished." Result: amber = apples. The book is populated with these interpolations: the use of "hoar- frost " in Frost's "The Mountain" is a pun on the poet's name; Marianne Moore's implicit allusion to Moorish architecture is also, yes, an intentional pun; Yeats uses the word "muscatel" in his poem "All Souls' Night" because he is hearing Keats's line "the coming musk -rose, full of dewy wine"; and so on. Has this man no shame? "For those of you concerned that my suggestion that Dickinson subliminally connects 'expiation' and 'expedition' might be a shade outlandish..."

Certainly anyone who has ever labored to write a credible academic paper will find an outlet here for hoots and howls. But maybe more enduring than the fantastic webs of association he spins is the theory behind this kind of reading. Muldoon states it quite explicitly in his final lecture:

Writer and reader blend into one indivisible function. Where their ends meet is itself indivisible from—might even be thought of as the definition of—the end of the poem....Both writer-as-reader and reader-as-writer meet at the interface between what is recognisable and what is new, negotiating as they do the to-and-fro between familiar and strange, both operating somewhere between the primary ecstatic state and the "secondary elaboration," as [the poet Robert] Graves describes it.

The labor in Muldoon's elaborations is significant, and we would be gravely mistaken, not to say unjust, to dismiss them out of hand as "unscholarly." The mind at work here does not mine a poem for the ore it will produce but enriches it with a memory that, however eccentric its associations, however faint the echoes it hears, does raise itself to that "primary ecstatic state" in which creation happens. When, after a particularly lengthy digression, Muldoon writes, "I know you're beginning to wonder if I'm now going backwards rather than forwards in my reading," one smiles despite oneself to discover, a few lines later, the mention of a "crab world." Enter Hamlet, as if on command: "Yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if like a crab you could go backwards," and then do we not think to ourselves as the old pedant does, "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't?"

In his first lecture he says by way of introduction, "I'll also be looking at other invisible threads through the poem." Here, and throughout, he means (whether consciously or no) more than we are likely to admit: that the poem is about weaving, yes, and that it has implicit sub texts, yes, but also that as readers we need someone to try on the emperor's clothes for us, to strut about proudly in them, giving us too good a view of himself and perfectly at ease with his own naked imagination—and if we are won over by it, who shall call it a deception?

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is broad as the world.................................... [Emerson "The American Scholar," 1837]

*

If Muldoon's prose is crisscrossed by bridges and boats, these rhetorical contortions that conflate the contradictory, reconcile the unrelated, they give his poetry a preternatural dexterity, the kind which, in a decathlete, one praises with "Will you look at the arms on that beast?" or some such remark. Most noticeably, the brawn is rigorously formal—an incorrigible, gleeful formality of patterned rhyme and stanzaic structure. Forty-four rhymed sonnets, ninety haiku rhymed aba (a series he calls "instant messages"), two poems in heroic couplets, a villanelle, a double villanelle, a sestina, a pantoum, and twelve pages of terza rima, just to name the most nameable forms, puff out their chests in Horse Latitudes, his most recent collection. No poet has so devoted himself to closed forms since Thomas Hardy, who was known to write out schematics of stressed and unstressed syllables at random and force himself to produce stanza upon stanza without straying from the madcap blueprint. Muldoon, too, seems to have set himself these exercises as a teacher would his student, a coach his precocious protégé.

Riotous, even mutinous entertainment reigns in these poems, not pedagogy: how does Muldoon free himself from these self-imposed strictures? For one thing, he allows his lines to vacillate wildly in length and stress, avoiding the familiar march of an iambic rhythm and, at all costs, the canonical pentameter. A reader stays off-balance, unable to predict the patterns of sound he will be asked to pronounce but assured that a system of rhyme will supply some level of cohesion.

......At least they weren't speaking ...French........ ............................ .............when my father sat with his .... brothers and sisters, two of each, on a ................................ramshackle bench ..................... at the end of a lane [...].

Part of the pleasure Muldoon takes from the formal architecture of his poems is obscuring that architecture, deluding the naked eye (or ear) into imagining that the poem is completely free-standing, autonomous. This is Muldoon the Trickster, Muldoon the Smart-Aleck, Muldoon the Undeniable Champ of the Parlor Game. In a sestina, "The Last Time I Saw Chris," the end-word "saw" is recapitulated through the six stanzas as "crosscut saw," "I saw" (verb), "seesaw," "ancient saw" (i.e. a saying), "foresaw," and "oversaw": from stanza to stanza one hears the word's recurring echo, but its meanings are so different that the mind hardly has time to note the repetition. This is precisely the technique Ezra Pound espouses in his advice on sestina-writing, to choose end-words with a number of different applications; he did not anticipate Muldoon, however, such an adept in the art of disguise that a reader finds himself stopping midway through the poem, to ask, "How exactly did he do that?" Almost every page of Horse Latitudes has some surprise hidden in it, some linguistic riddle to solve. Thus, a paradox: the poet tries to veil his artificial forms (of rhyme, repetition, etc.), but not so well that his reader is distracted by the veiling artifice.

For the poetics aside, one finds much else to like about these poems. Foremost is an irrepressible love of language that pervades everything Muldoon writes and compels him, almost against his will, to play on words, syntax, and dead metaphors one might have thought too dead for resurrection. The latter give rise to a sonnet sequence called "The Old Country," half doggerel, half rap, born of the single formula, "Every ____ was a ____," and where clichés, in part, give a window on the colloquial speech of Muldoon's native Northern Ireland.

Every slope was a slippery slope
where every shave was a very close ...shave
and money was money for old rope
where every grave was a watery grave

The catalog grows and grows; the rhythm builds; one begins scratching one's head, "Where is he going with this?"; and only then realizes that language is one of the poet's subjects, as well as the tool of his trade.

Every unsheathed sword was somehow .... sheathed in rime.......................... Every cut was a cut to the quick.

Ah, a coherent image: Muldoon chipping away at the frozen language of his ancestors, delving into the solidified "rhyme," the ready-to-hand phrase, our day-to-day communication, and finding warm life, "the quick," still pulsing beneath. Then, too there is the play on the idea of Poet-As-Hero: here he is more Poet-As-Antique-Dealer, handler of past heroes' used equipment, whose act of refurbishing is somehow offensive, painful, "a cut to the quick." There is feeling here, not just a feeling for language, as the saying goes, but a feeling of indebtedness to it, a military loyalty. Othello turns his warlike eye on the writer: "Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them."

Making a life new, or a new life, is no easier than a language, and all the while Muldoon is polishing his craft, he is also tramping through the ruts of middle age. The "horse latitudes" that give this collection its title refer, as the jacket cover so kindly points out, "to those areas thirty degrees north and south of the equator where sailing ships tend to stand becalmed in mid-ocean...and where sailors...would throw their live cargo overboard to lighten the load and conserve food and water." Muldoon, 55, a professor at Princeton for the last fifteen years, evidently feels the possibility of going slack himself and fights back in a kind of desperation against it. The sequence he calls "Horse Latitudes" with which the book opens consists of nineteen sonnets, each titled by the name of a battle (all inexplicably starting with the letter B). The poems slip in and out of their setting in Nashville to imagined elsewheres, much as a bored sailor stuck aboard a motionless ship might daydream of action and movement and struggle on solid land in distant regions, though he have naught to inspire him but a nautical chart—or the "B" section of an index of military history.

Nearly all the poems share the minor, almost dissonant key of repetition—not that of his prose, one lecture always stooping to tie the laces of the previous, but that of insistent, painstaking progress. In "Perdu," the last phrase of each couplet provides the beginning of the next; in "Flags and Emblems," each quatrain is spaced by the antique refrain "Riddle-me-o / Riddle-me-o"; in an homage to Bob Dylan, the repetition arises from imitating the songwriter's more recent twelve-bar blues style, which is itself the product of a long tradition. Dylan is Muldoon's kindred spirit in wishing continually to throw his voice, to draw on other artists, to repeat in an original way, and thereby reinvent himself.

It's that self-same impulse that has him ...rearrange
both "The Times They Are A-Changin'" ...and "Things Have Changed".

So often repetition is an energy internal to itself. The waves slap against the boat, one just like the one that follows, seeming to roll underneath you without pushing you anywhere, the way pure learning rolls from the lectern, down the aisles, out the double-doors. The keen-eared student wonders what he missed. Listen once more—something like wind begins to purse the sail, to smart in the ear the way water smarts on a open wound—a feeling raw enough, naked enough to give oneself to.

The poem itself is, after all, the solution to a problem only it has raised, and our reading of it necessarily entails determining what that problem was. Only then may we determine the extent to which it has, or has not, succeeded. That is the only decent end of the poem and our only decent end is to let the poem have its way with us, just as the poet let it have its way with him or her.

Henry Walters wears his own clothes and dislikes water.