april warman
moral concern which makes [his] work imaginatively exhilarating when its ostens-
iblesubject matter might be reckoned wholly appalling’.^39 Sean O’Brien goes so far
as to identify not simply a potential for amoral reading (imaginative exhilaration)
in ‘some of the grimmer poems of sex and violence inQuoof’, but a reprehensible
writerly attitude: that ‘art is...an end for which life is simply material’.^40 Anyone
wishing to deny the existence of a moral impulse behind the apparent amorality of
Muldoon’s poems could not be refuted definitively by recourse to textual evidence.
The texts refuse moral meanings; it is perfectly possible, even desirable, to interpret
that amorality as an oblique gesture towards some more positive impulse; but, as the
range of routes to a propitious interpretation of ‘The More a Man Has’ illustrated
above shows, no one such reading can be asserted as definitive or inevitable.
Writing is generally perceived as a moral, humanist endeavour,^41 and such a
perception is only heightened when writing is known to come from a situation of
conflict in which humanism is endangered. Because of this, the explanation that
readers provide for the gap that appears in Muldoon, between shocking subject-
matter and affectless response, will almost always take the form of a moral rationale
for the apparent amorality. Peter Robinson sees in a later poem, ‘Incantata’, an
elegy for a former lover, an ‘attempt...to be...a reparative emblem’, but concedes
that ‘This is a status the poem cannot claim, nor the poet claim for it, but which
readers, in appreciating it, may confer.’^42 Such reparative ambition is less clearly
apparent in Muldoon’s early poetry, but readers are nonetheless frequently eager
to confer reparative status, in relation to Northern Irish violence, upon it.^43
LouisMacNeicewroteofhiscollectionSolstices, ‘My own position has been
aptly expressed by the dying Mrs Gradgrind in Dickens’sHard Times: ‘‘I think
there’s a pain somewhere in the room but I couldn’t positively say that I have
got it.’’ ’^44 Readers tend to assume that the ‘pain’ of Northern Irish experience
is unspoken but somehow contained in Muldoon’s early poems; the conclusions
they draw on the basis of this assumption are, however, ones for which he need
take no responsibility, unconfirmed as they are by the surface content of his work.
The poems themselves are devoid of moral content; it is only when they are read
that their disengaged stance couples with readers’ preconceptions to produce the
(^39) Terence Brown,Ireland’s Literature(Mullingar and Totowa, NJ: Lilliput Press and Barnes &
Noble, 1988), 219.
(^40) Sean O’Brien,The Deregulated Muse(Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998), 178.
(^41) See e.g. Martha Nussbaum’s assertion: ‘So far as the implied author goes, I think very often there
is a claim that the form of desire and attention thatis embodied in the text is of superior human value
in some way’ (‘An Interview with Martha Nussbaum’,Cogito, 10/3 (Nov. 1996), 181–2).
(^42) Peter Robinson,Poetry, Poets, Readers: Making Things Happen(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002),
187.
(^43) Longley, e.g. casts Muldoon’s poetry as ‘midwife to a future not predicated on the past’, and
‘the labour-pains of progress’ (Longley, ‘Poetry and Politics in Northern Ireland’, 210; andidem,
‘ ‘‘Varieties of Parable’’: Louis MacNeice and Paul Muldoon’, inPoetry in the Wars, 222).
(^44) Louis MacNeice, in Clare Brown and Don Paterson (eds.),Don’t Ask Me What I Mean: Poets in
Their Own Words(London: Picador, 2003), 165.