Paul Muldoon’s Etymological Thread

Paul Muldoon’s ‘negative epistemology’, which claims both total knowing and total unknowing on the part of the poet, is a main theme of this chapter, due to the double and porous valences etymologies often acquire in his work. This is explored in the context of tropes of fusion and confusion (as in Muldoon’s ‘pied’ readings or Joyce’s ‘conglomerwritings’, as well as poetic motifs of boundary, transience, and transgression), conjunction and disjunction (focused on Muldoon’s ‘or’ phrases), and Muldoon’s ambivalently serious invocations of determinative onomastics, or nomen est omen. The final sections propose an etymological approach to Muldoon’s oeuvre, which would read the development of motifs, themes, diction, and even rhymes diachronically across the corpus.