Title: For 'mythical' read 'empathic' : Paul Muldoon's 'Third Epistle to Timothy' and 'The Bangle (Slight Return)' as exercises in empathy
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2018, vol. 44, iss. 1, pp. [153]-165
Extent
[153]-165
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2018-1-9
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/138673
Type: Article
Language
License: Not specified license
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
The paper focuses on the notion of empathy in contrast to systemic ethics in" Paul Muldoon's two poems, "Third Epistle to Timothy" and "The Bangle (Slight Return)," from his 1998 collection, Hay. Ethics is here entwined with what T. S. Eliot described as the mythical method. It is argued here that Muldoon resorts to the formal paradigm but works his way beyond the transcendental, religion-motivated position adopted by Eliot, particularly in his later social critiques. On the one hand, in "third Epistle to Timothy," I investigate the biblical context of the poem to demonstrate that all externally-imposed codes of ethic can be subject to corruption. On the other, in "The Bangle (Slight Return)," I show that the mythical references, rather than corroborate an elitist agenda, indicate that to embody an experience of another person's different a polymorphous language is needed that would simultaneously be used with full responsibility for whatever it should evoke.
Note
The article has been written within the framework of the project financed by The National Science Centre, Cracow, Poland, pursuant to the decision number DEC 2017/25/B/HS2/02099.
References
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[2] Brown, John (2002) In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from the North of Ireland. Cliffs of Moher: Salmon Publishing.
[3] Clohesy, Anthony M. (2013) Politics of Empathy. London and New York: Routledge.
[4] De Man, Paul (1979) Allegories of Reading. Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale University Press.
[5] Eliot, T. S. (1949) Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society, Notes towards the Definition of Culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
[6] Eliot, T. S. (2002) Collected Poems: 1909–1962. London: Faber and Faber.
[7] Eliot, T. S. (2005) Ulysses, order, and myth. In: Rainey, Lawrence (ed.) Modernism: An Anthology. Malden: Blackwell, 165–167.
[8] Gardner, Helen (1957) The Metaphysical Poets. Oxford: Penguin.
[9] Heaney, Seamus (2003) Finders – Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
[10] Holdridge, Jefferson (2008) The Poetry of Paul Muldoon. Dublin: The Liffey Press.
[11] Joyce, James (1977) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. St. Albans: Panther.
[12] Kramer, Kenneth Paul (2007) Redeeming Time: T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Lanham: Cowley Publications.
[13] Lundeen, Kathleen (2001) Who has the right to feel? The ethics of literary empathy. In: Davis, Todd F. and Kenneth Womack (eds.) Mapping the Ethical Turn. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 83–92.
[14] Muldoon, Paul (1998) Getting round: Notes towards an Ars Poetica. Essays in Criticism 48 (2), 107–128. | DOI 10.1093/eic/48.2.107
[15] Muldoon, Paul (1980) Paul Muldoon writes…. The Poetry Book Society Bulletin 106, 1.
[16] Muldoon, Paul (2001) Poems. London: Faber and Faber.
[17] Muldoon, Paul (2006) The End of the Poem. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[18] Muldoon, Paul (1994) The Prince of the Quotidian. Dublin: The Gallery Press.
[19] Murphy, Russell Elliott (2007) T. S. Eliot: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts on File.
[20] Oser, Lee (2007) The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[21] Robbins, Michael (2011) Paul Muldoon's covert operations. Modern Philology 109 (2), 266–299. | DOI 10.1086/663233
[22] Wills, Clair (1998) Reading Paul Muldoon. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe.
[23] Xiros Cooper, John (2009) In times of emergency: Eliot' social criticism." In: Chinitz, David E. (ed.) A Companion to T. S. Eliot. Malden: Blackwell, 287–298.
[24] Yeats, W. B. (1996) The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. New York: Scribner.