For father read mother: Muldoon's antecedents

This chapter explores the possibility that Robert Graves' poetry was the unlikely precursor for the mythological and lexicographical challenge posed by Muldoon's work. Muldoon's literary criticism, notably in To Ireland, I, bears an uncanny resemblance to the ‘proleptic or analeptic method of thought’ expounded by Graves in The White Goddess. Both transform etymological quests into literary interpretive strategies; both work to some extent on the principle that arbitrary connections yield a form of narrative coherence. Muldoon is also a poet who breaks with tradition, but who provides within his own poetry a parody of the tradition he disrupts. Like Graves, he implicitly offers at least the illusion of continuity even as he refutes it.