Literature review: TS Eliot / The Waste Land, Abbey Theatre, Dublin

Paul Muldoon takes it for granted that a poet’s words speak for him, rather than just the other way round. No allusions are accidental, all possible echoes are to be considered. To use a contemporary metaphor, the poem, for Muldoon, is a hypertext, each word a potential link or jumping off point for his playful erudition.

For the inaugural TS Eliot Lecture at the Abbey Theatre, Muldoon puts his method to work on Eliot’s dense 1920 poem ‘Whispers of Immortality’. In Muldoon’s hands it is a poem emanating from the pain of Eliot’s troubled marriage and haunted by Bertrand Russell’s affair with his wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot.