Playing Indian/Disintegrating Irishness: Paul Muldoon and the Politics of Cross-Cultural Comparison

Abstract

My reading of Derek Walcott’s Omeros is paradigmatic for debating the aesthetic and political complexities that arise when literary inheritances belonging to Western, canonical forms mediate intractable social contradictions stemming from global modernity and, at the same time, for investigating how these forms work within and replicate the hierarchies of cultural and economic capital in world literature. In this chapter, I turn to Northern Irish-born and US resident Paul Muldoon. This chapter similarly questions how his experimentations in British literary forms engage, in this case, the conjunction of imperial modernity and globalization upon the Irish state and the New World. We can see this through his recurring preoccupation with—or cultural appropriation of—the connection between Irish and American Indian cultures across his work. ¹ This preoccupation begins with “The Indians on Alcatraz” in his first collection New Weather (1973), continues in poems such as “Promises, Promises” from Why Brownlee Left (1980) and the widely anthologized title poem of Meeting the British (1987), reaches its apogee in “Madoc: A Mystery” (1990), and persists in muted form in a poem such as “As” from Moy Sand and Gravel (2002).