‘An Inconstant Stay’: Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney and the Ends of Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Abstract

The sonnet has been a much used form in modern Irish poetry. W.B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Michael Longley, Ciaran Carson, Leontia Flynn and many others have used it to considerable effect, whether in single poems or across longer sequences. The phenomenon of the modern Irish sonnet has been examined by critics in relation to the fraught Anglo-Irish political climate of the 1970s and 1980s, and Irish poetry’s growing internationalist self-confidence. The sonnet has also played a key role in critical discussions of Irish poetry’s seeming adherence to traditional notions of poetic form. However, the Shakespearean dimensions to the profusion of sonnets in modern Irish poetry have yet to be evaluated in either cultural-political or formal terms. Focusing on the spectacular, compulsive engagement of Paul Muldoon with the sonnet, this chapter traces a line back from Muldoon’s recent ‘Sonnet 15: A Graft’ (a direct response to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15) to Muldoon’s earlier work in the form. It argues that Shakespeare’s Sonnets were one of the means by which Muldoon in the 1970s and 1980s sought out the end of the poem – to draw on the key guiding term of his Oxford Professor of Poetry lectures. Furthermore, the Shakespearean ends offered a means of engaging with the limits of the Irish sonnet, not least as it emerged under Seamus Heaney’s stewardship. In Muldoon’s sonnets, Shakespeare’s sonnets offer a field of ironic, disquieting excess that pushes beyond either the benighted circumstances of Anglo-Irish history or the comforts offered by any investment in the literary and its traditions.