april warman
In fact, both Muldoon’s circumstances and his temperament dictate that he
cannotbe, and certainly does not present himself as, a war poet in the tradition
of the influential figure that Rawlinson delineates. Whereas Owen conforms, and
contributes, to Rawlinson’s model—‘Twentieth-century canons of war literature
privilege the perspective of the combatant soldier who is engaged in war’s central
activity of injuring and killing persons’^13 (an experience which Heaney recasts as ‘a
life so extremely mortgaged to the suffering of others that the tenancy of the palace
of art is paid for a hundredfold’^14 )—and whereas Heaney himself, though not a
combatant, has been, at times, inclined to identify strongly (and controversially)^15
with a traumatized community, Muldoon tends to distance himself from the notion
that he can, or would wish to, speak as one who has suffered, or as representative
of a suffering community: ‘The poems I’ve written about the political situation [in
Northern Ireland] tend to be oblique, and I think properly so.’^16
This caution is in keeping with the fact that while Muldoon, as a resident of
Belfast from 1969 to 1985, lived in a time and place of violence, his involvement was
onlyin potentia: until you are the victim of a terrorist attack, you can hardly claim
to be a target. He was, like many others, in an indeterminate relation to the violence
occurring in sometimes close proximity to him: not a victim by comparison with
those actually hurt, killed, or bereaved (or an agent compared with those doing the
killing), but not unaffected by comparison with those entirely outside the arena of
violence. The conflict in Northern Ireland does feature increasingly in Muldoon’s
early work, but, as he says, it and the moral responses it evokes feature obliquely,
in such a way as to disavow any authority that might accrue to the poet through
them. This essay aims to examine how this obliquity functions; how (and how far),
despite, alongside, or even through, his famous evasiveness, not only the fact of
sectarian violence, but also its felt moral implications for those who experience it
(with whatever degree of directness), appear in Muldoon’s early poetry.
This obliquity functions in Muldoon’s early work principally, I would argue,
through the inscrutable attitudes to violence of the poems’ personae. Poems
that relate to violence (not only specifically Northern Irish violence) are most
frequently cast as first-person narrative, but their speakers rarely do more than
(^13) Rawlinson,British Writing of the Second World War, 11.
(^14) Heaney, ‘The Government of the Tongue’, inThe Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T. S. Eliot
Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings(London: Faber, 1988), 100. For a corrective to a too
hagiographical view of Owen, see Geoffrey Hill’s more measured appraisal: ‘Owen’s sense of his own
value as ‘‘pleader’’ for the inarticulate common soldier presupposes his unawareness or inability to
comprehend that at least three of the finest British poets of that war, Isaac Rosenberg, Ivor Gurney,
and David Jones, had gone, or were still going, as ‘‘common soldiers’’ through all that he describes’
(Hill, ‘Language, Suffering, and Silence’, 15 Literary Imagination, 1/2 (1999), 247).
e.g. Edna Longley contends that ‘empathy with one Ulster community, such as Heaney’s in
North, might constrain rather than release apoet’s imagination’ (Longley, ‘Poetry and Politics in
Northern Ireland’, inPoetry in the Wars(Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1986), 202).
(^16) Muldoon, ‘Paul Muldoon’, 137.