Poetic emergencies: senses of ending in Paul Muldoon’s "Incantata"

Paul Muldoon’s lectures as Professor of Poetry at Oxford demonstrate a sustained interest in how poems might be said to “end”. On several occasions, he returns to Giorgio Agamben’s short essay “The End of the Poem” and its argument that a poem’s conclusion is a kind of “emergency”, a source of anxiety for the poem as a whole. This essay proposes that Muldoon’s engagement with Agamben and ideas of ending responds to his own poetic work, and especially to the elegies of his 1994 collection “The Annals of Chile”. The essay offers “Incantata” as an exemplar of Muldoon’s thinking about poetic endings, situating it within the context of modern elegy to show how a poem’s awareness of its own closure can shape its approaches to subject matter, form, and temporality.