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

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.04

Keywords:

Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, elegy, contemporary Irish poetry

Abstract

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.

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Author Biography

Wit Pietrzak, University of Lodz

Wit Pietrzak is Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Lodz. His main areas of interest are modernist and contemporary British and Irish poetry, as well as theory of literature.

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Published

2021-11-22

How to Cite

Pietrzak, W. (2021). Shibboleths of Grief: Paul Muldoon’s “The Triumph”. Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, (11), 51–63. https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.04