SOURCE: Wilson, William A. “Paul Muldoon and the Poetics of Sexual Difference.” Contemporary Literature 28, no. 3 (fall 1987): 317-31.

In the following essay, Wilson discusses Muldoon's break from the Yeatsian tradition of Irish poetry, particularly as evidenced in Muldoon's patterns of sexual signification and linguistic dichotomies that reflect the poet's effort to come to terms with his sense of paternal loss and the deconstructed culture of the postmodern world.

As part of his deconstruction of Irish criticism, Seamus Deane described two dominant styles in Irish history and letters:

One is “Romantic,” a mode of reading which takes pleasure in the notion that Ireland is a culture enriched by the ambiguity of its relationship to an anachronistic and modernized present. The other is a mode of reading which denies the glamour of this ambiguity and seeks to escape from it into a pluralism of the present. The authors who represent these...