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UNAVOWED
ENGAGEMENT:
PAUL MULDOON
AS WAR POET
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Paul Muldoon is not a writer for whom the term ‘war poet’ seems immediately
appropriate. The commonest association of the phrase ‘war poetry’ is with the
strong moral drive which appears in Owen’s famous ‘Preface’—‘Above all I am
not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War....All a poet can do today is
warn’^1 —or in Seamus Heaney’s writings of the 1970s: ‘From that moment [the
start of the Troubles in summer 1969] the problems of poetry moved from
being simply a matter of achieving the satisfactory verbal icon to being a search
for images and symbols adequate to our predicament.’^2 As Mark Rawlinson
argues, ‘In the influential figure of the war poet as it has been constructed
since 1914, cultural and moral authority is founded in an agent-centred and
engaged perspective on combat.’^3 It is hard to see Muldoon in anything other
than an antithetical relation to this model. He has repudiated any moral bent
(^1) Wilfred Owen, ‘Preface’, inTheCompletePoemsandFragments, ii:The Manuscripts and Fragments,
ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth Press, and Oxford University Press, 1983),
535.
(^2) Seamus Heaney, ‘Feeling into Words’, inPreoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978(London:
Faber, 1980), 56.
(^3) Mark Rawlinson,British Writing of the Second World War(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 13.