LECTURE 29

OUR LAST TWO POETS
I: EAVAN BOLAND (b. 1944)
--Writing against Yeats and Padraic Pearse
--Y & P = Irish poet as bard, seer
--Boland = tentative conjuring of fragments

"The Dolls Museum in Dublin" (1994)
--The function of dolls
--Resurrection and insurrection
--Sunlight/shadow/twilight
--Hostages

"That the Science of Cartography is Limited" (1994)
--What do maps leave out?
--What must poetry fill in?

II: PAUL MULDOON (b. 1951)
--Some characteristics: "whimful," given to serious play, a lover of traditional forms, but yoked with a casual tone, a lover of patterns of doubling and replication.

"Milkweed and Monarch" from The Annals of Chile (1994), Muldoon's seventh anthology.
--Song about the power of random association to evoke intense emotion
--Pairs linked by ----?
--Form: Villanelle
5 tercets: aba, aba, aba, aba, aba.
1 quatrain: abaa.
--Here? 7 tercets and 1 quatrain.
--Strict form, throwaway tone.