These brilliant, extravagant, and entertaining essays are based on Muldoon's Oxford Lectures on poetry. Subjecting the idea of the "end of the poem" to multiple interpretations, he uses these interpretations as springboards to detailed readings of just under twenty poems. His method uses associations, allusions, similarities, puns, influences, and wordplay to extract every possible shred of meaning from a poem. This is always entertaining, and if he sometimes oversteps normal reasonable bounds, he often creates an complicated web of reference to other poems, biography, and critical writings so compelling that I was swept along, if only by the sheer brilliance and buoyant intellectual fun of it all. All in all, one of the most entertaining and stimulating books of poetry criticism that I've read. ( )

This book is a collection of 15 lectures delivered over the course of five years at Oxford during Muldoon's tenure there as a professor of poetry. Each lecture is a close reading of a particular poem from the likes of Yeats, Pessoa, Marianne Moore, etc. As could be expected, some chapters are stronger than others (and some are quite brilliant, in fact), but overall it is a solid performance.