Shibboleths of Grief: Paul Muldoon’s “The Triumph”

• Authors: Wit Pietrzak

Abstracts

EN

The essay explores Paul Muldoon’s elegy for the fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson with a view to showing that “The Triumph” seeks to evoke a ground where political, cultural and religious polarities are destabilized. As the various intertextual allusions in the poem are traced, it is argued that Muldoon seeks to revise the notion of the Irish shibboleths that, as the poem puts it, “are meant to trip you up.” In lieu of this linguistic and political slipperiness, “The Triumph” situates Carson’s protean invocations of Belfast and traditional Irish music as the new shibboleths of collectivity.

Keywords

EN

Paul Muldoon; Ciaran Carson; elegy; contemporary Irish poetry

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture
• Year: 2021
• Issue: 11
• Pages: 51-63

Dates

published

2021

Contributors

author

Wit Pietrzak

• University of Lodz

• https://orcid.org/0000000322317036

References

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Identifiers

DOI

10.18778/2083-2931.11.04

Biblioteka Nauki

2032781