"All Will Be Swept Away": Dimensions of Elegy in the Poetry of Paul Muldoon

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.

Wit Pietrzak is Professor of British and Irish Literature at the Institute of English Studies, University of Lódź, Poland. His main areas of interest are modernist and contemporary Anglophone poetry as well as theory and philosophy of literature. He has published The Critical Thoughtof W. B. Yeats and numerous essays on contemporary British and Irish poetry.