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More than Meets the ‘I’: Paul Muldoon’s Elegy ‘Yarrow’

Alexandra Tauvry

Résumés

L’élégie ‘Yarrow’ de Paul Muldoon illustre l’instabilité du « je » poétique, le dédoublement de cette première personne, et la fragmentation de l’identité qui caractérisent les poèmes intimes du poète. En effet, même le poème le plus personnel et autobiographique de Muldoon n’offre pas une représentation du « je » poétique unifiée et immédiate. Au contraire, le poète offre au lecteur de multiples autoportraits fragmentés, voire romancés, qui se défont à mesure qu’ils se créent.

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  • 1 Jean-Michel Maulpoix, « Table ronde I. La part de l’autobiographie dans la poésie contemporaine : u (...)

1This article focuses on the relationship between poetic form and autobiographical drive in the elegy entitled ‘Yarrow’ by Northern Irish poet Paul Muldoon. This study engages with the debate regarding the place of poetry in autobiographical writing, which has been a very contentious issue and has claimed great critical attention over the past few decades. These recent theories on the relationship between poetry and autobiography make a clear break from Philippe Lejeune’s notions of authenticity, unity, and faithfulness, which characterised autobiographical writing in the past. Jean-Michel Maulpoix argues, for instance, that autobiography tends to centre the subject, whereas poetry scatters and disfigures it1. Similarly, the combination of autobiography and verse affects Muldoon’s poetic self-portrayal(s) in ‘Yarrow’, the long concluding poem written in memory of his mother, Brigid Regan, in The Annals of Chile (1994).

  • 2 Qtd. in Earl G. Ingersoll & Stan Sanvel Rubin, “The Invention of the I: A Conversation with Paul Mu (...)

2‘Yarrow’ is a rather challenging epic poem, which is made up of a hundred and fifty lyrics or “twelve intercut, exploded sestinas”, as Muldoon puts it himself2. This monumental elegy highlights the commemorative design of the collection as a whole. The dedication to Brigid Regan illustrates how central the mother figure is and, by extension, the extent to which female characters pervade The Annals of Chile. Clair Wills argues that The Annals is a

  • 3 Clair Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon, Newcastle Upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1998, p. 158.

3more open, lyric [collection] than Muldoon has produced for some time, and it is tempting to connect this with the powerful feminine presence in the books, and to the fact that these are, among other things, narratives of birth and death3.

  • 4 Tim Kendall, Paul Muldoon, Bridgend, Seren, 1996, p. 209.
  • 5 This term was first used by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida: “I like certain biographical features (...)

4According to critics, this volume is one of the most personal works Muldoon has ever written. Tim Kendall considers for instance that the collection is Muldoon’s “most candidly autobiographical volume”4. ‘Yarrow’ is in fact one of the rare poems that discloses some autobiographical elements (or biographèmes5) enabling the reader to reconstruct the poet’s own self-portrait.

  • 6 In L’Autobiographie en France (1971), Philippe Lejeune defines the pragmatic dimension of autobiogr (...)

5However, despite this strong autobiographical dimension, Muldoon plays with and subverts the autobiographical pact by creating not just one self-portrait, but a mosaic of self-portraits6. These multiple representations result from the fragmentation of the lyric “I”, which characterizes the association of autobiography and verse. The poetic “I” is not singular but multiple. Furthermore, the multiplicity of first person voices in this poetic narrative creates not only a series of fragmented self-portraits but also fictional ones.

6After analysing the coexistence and overlapping of two autobiographical self-portraits in this elegy (that of the poet-narrator and that of the poet as a young boy), this study focuses on the origins of the fragmentation of the remembered self. This article concludes on an analysis of the endless series of fictional self-portraits that offset the autobiographical dimension of ‘Yarrow’.

The overlapping of autobiographical self-portraits

  • 7 Philippe Gasparini, Est-il je ? Roman autobiographique et autofiction, Paris, Seuil, 2004, p. 49. T (...)

The recollection of the childhood place often goes together with the theme of exile and uprooting. The character tries to find his self through this constant back and forth movement7

  • 8 Irish writer and critic Seamus Deane said that Muldoon was “in exile” in Princeton. In The Prince o (...)

7‘Yarrow’ was written after Muldoon’s 1992 visit to his parents’ grave and to the family home in the village of The Moy in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. This was his first visit to the family home since his departure for the United States in 1987. In ‘Yarrow’, the 1992 speaker tries to recollect his 1963 younger self years after his “exile”8.

8Muldoon once said in an interview that he can recall the past “almost at will”, without even travelling physically to the place of his childhood:

  • 9 In James S. F. Wilson, “Paul Muldoon: The Art of Poetry”, The Paris Review No. 87, Vol. 45 No. 169, (...)

INTERVIEWER: Are your childhood memories still vivid?
MULDOON: Absolutely. I do feel very much that I can be in that moment, almost at will. It takes almost nothing to get me back there, certainly to the house I was brought up in, after the age of four, near a village called the Moy. The room I had there was a bedroom-cum-workroom looking on to a little backyard with a house, that my father had built, used mostly for pigs9.

  • 10 By “vignette” I mean a textual fragment that is isolated from prior and succeeding text by the blan (...)

9In ‘Yarrow’, the poet-narrator looks back on the past and even travels back in time. The poem oscillates between stories narrated by the 1992 speaker and stories narrated by the 1963 speaker. There are therefore two different types of focalization, two coexisting narrative voices: instead of having a single speaker reminiscing his 1963 younger self, the narrative is alternatively told by the “I” of the middle-aged Muldoon and that of the young Muldoon aged eleven or twelve. As a result, the reader is given various perspectives on the past through two different “I” or eyes: in some vignettes we witness the progressive disappearance of the family farm through the eyes of the 1992 speaker who is inspecting what remains of the now-gone family farm and in other vignettes we time-travel to the year 1963 and revisit the farm through the eyes of the young Muldoon10.

10Not only are there temporal shifts, but also spatial ones. The elegy starts with the 1992 speaker who seems to be constantly fiddling with an imaginary remote control, fast-forwarding and rewinding between 1963 and 1992. The reader is therefore constantly jostled by the change in setting since we are in perpetual transit between the location of the 1963 speaker (who is on the family farm in Co. Armagh) and several locations in 1992 (the speaker is either on the family farm thirty years on, or back in America after his visit). In one of the early vignettes, this incessant to-and-fro movement in time and in space is made obvious when the remembered image of the parents in 1963 is directly followed by the image of the 1992 speaker:

  • 11 Paul Muldoon, The Annals of Chile, London, Faber, 1994 p. 43.

For the moment, though, she thumbs through a seed-catalogue
she’s borrowed from Tohill’s of the Moy
while, quiet, almost craven,

he studies the grain in the shaft of a rake:
there are two palm-prints in blue stone
on the bib of his overalls

where he’s absentmindedly put his hands
to his heart; in a den in St John’s, Newfoundland, I browse
on a sprig of Achillea millefolium, as it’s classed11.

  • 12 Emmanuel Laugier, “Table ronde I. La part de l’autobiographie dans la poésie contemporaine : un ren (...)

11By way of a simple semi-colon in the penultimate line, the author marks the transition from past to present. As in this vignette, memories from 1963 are often narrated in the present tense as if they were called from the past and relived in the present time of 1992. As a result, the narrative alternates between two presents—that of the old days or the recent past, and that of today—making it difficult for the reader to differentiate between the 1963 “I” and the 1992 “I”. Emmanuel Laugier argues that when poetry and autobiography are combined, the “I” does not look back towards the past—towards what “was”—but reactualises what “was”12. These 1963 memories read as if they were reactualised in the present time of 1992. The reader is constantly navigating between 1963 and 1992, and the succession of vignettes reads as a spatiotemporal pell-mell: it is almost impossible to keep track of the progression of each past and contemporary event. In order to reconstruct these memories, which would enable us to grasp the 1992 and 1963 speakers’ identities separately and restore the chronological order, we have to isolate these mnemonic fragments to recreate a sense of linearity.

  • 13 « Selon Julien Gracq, l’écrit autobiographique fait de son auteur ‘un voyageur avec bagages, bagage (...)

12According to French writer Julien Gracq in Carnets du grand chemin, an autobiographical writer is like a traveller who carries several pieces of luggage, each containing a skeleton. He further argues that each skeleton is one of the writer’s own doubles that has been preserved—even mummified—at different stages of his or her life13. In ‘Yarrow’, the narrative alternates between vignettes of the middle-aged writer and vignettes of this younger double. However, this self-portrait of the young Muldoon has neither been fully “preserved” nor “mummified”, the image that is given of the younger speaker is not a full-blown portrait. It has been almost literally scattered and it is up to the reader to reassemble the fragments of this portrait in order to reconstruct the image of the young Muldoon.

Splinters of memories: fragmented vignettes of the remembered self

13If we set out to reconstruct the portrait of the 1963 “I”, it is clear from the first few lines of the elegy that this is made more complex not only by the fact that the narrative runs over 150 pages but especially by the fact that we are dealing with poetry.

14The poetic form visually mirrors the fragmentation of the author’s multiple self-portraits, more so than any other literary genre. Just like any poem, the presence of a blank between each stanza—sometimes coupled with the use of an asterisk—emphasises this fragmentation. Furthermore, the treatment of temporality in autobiographical poetry differs from autobiography in prose in so far as the linearity of the time sequence is often disrupted. Contrary to the general view that there is a sense of temporal continuity in some autobiographical works, the resonance between events and associative digressions takes precedence over the chronological sequence when it comes to autobiographical poetry. As a result, the process of recollection is from the start thwarted by the formal fragmentation of poetry that inevitably leads to temporal discontinuities. This lack of chronological order is one of the factors that accounts for the fragmentation of the 1963 self-portrait.

15This is particularly the case when it comes to the episode in which the young Muldoon is asked to buy seeds at the local grocer’s. If we set out to reconstruct this central memory in ‘Yarrow’, we soon come to realise that this memory-event is literally scattered (just like seeds) throughout the elegy: on page 43, the mother thumbs through a seed-catalogue; on page 70, she ticks off a list of seeds; finally, on page 103, she gives the carbon-slip to her son. This memory from 1963 is consequently disseminated throughout the poem. Some of the memories read as puzzles, which the reader must reassemble in order to reconstruct the chronology and form a full image of the younger speaker. The fact that these three vignettes do not follow each other in linear fashion (particularly in longer poetic pieces) is often due to the author’s use of lines of association induced by the speaker’s mental wanderings or stream of consciousness. The formal fragmentation previously discussed is coupled with, and amplified by, the associative process: on page 43, the word “seed” (in “seed-catalogue”) triggers the image of the yarrow plant, which prevents the development of the speaker’s recollection of his mother; and on page 70, the local grocer’s name (“Tohill”) drives the narrative away from this specific memory (“Tohill, from tuathal, / meaning ‘withershins”’). ‘Yarrow’ follows an associative logic rather than a linear and chronological one, which accentuates the formal / spatiotemporal discontinuities and contributes to the fragmentation of the subject and his memories. Although this associative logic is a present tense continuity of the remembered thoughts and events, this continuity differs from historical linearity (the continuity of the historical events that are being remembered). In other words, this present tense continuity is a rearranged continuity of the original historical sequence.

16Lines of association may be present in any literary genre, but they are all the more obvious in poetry: line breaks, stanza breaks, envois, internal rhymes, rhyming patterns, caesuras, enjambments, etc., all feature among the diverse formal aspects of poetry that favour lines of association over the chronological order and participate in the fragmentation of memories. The process of association does not develop full-blown memories; rather, it offers fragments of memories. Instead of charting a memory throughout a poem and favouring the linearity of the time sequence, memories are “atomised” and the reader has to find mnemonic splinters among diverse poems and collections in order to recreate the unity of the memory (as with the seeds episode).

  • 14 Muldoon, op. cit., p. 103.

17Moreover, not only are memories splintered because of these constant temporal shifts, but their autobiographical dimension is also undermined by their fictionalisation. In fact, some vignettes create the appearance of fiction because characters are partly fictionalised, as exemplified by the composite image of Muldoon’s mother and King Lear. In one of the vignettes, the mother delivers some of the king’s lines from the Shakespearean play: “my ma hands me the carbon-slip; ‘But to the girdle do the gods’, / she repeats, ‘but to the girdle do the gods inherit’”14. Although the mother is only repeating these lines, just as an actor on stage would, one might think, for an instant, that she has been transformed into Shakespeare’s character. The fictionalisation of the mother figure could be due to the fact that the poet is trying to come to terms with her death: the mother’s journey from life to death is in a way mirrored by the movement from the real to the fictional.

18The mother figure is not the only family member who is fictionalised to a great extent in this elegy, the 1963 “I” also undergoes a process of fictionalisation. The poet plays with his former boyhood fantasies inspired by his childhood readings and stages his own self. The 1963 “I” is therefore travestied and a series of fictional self-portraits unravels throughout the elegy, overlapping with the author’s referential self-portraits.

Paul Muldoon’s Fictionalised Self-Portraits

  • 15 Ingersoll & Rubin, op. cit..

‘Yarrow’ was written over a period of about eighteen months to two years. […]. The poem is set in contemporary Newfoundland but goes back and forth to that period of my childhood and has to do with all sorts of adventure stories—the imaginative life, I suppose, of a child of ten, or eleven. [...] It’s the background of a poet’s mind, or whatever […] a child’s mind, but written with somewhat loopy style.15

  • 16 Qtd. in Arnaud Schmitt, “Making the Case for Self-Narration Against Autofiction”, a/b: Auto/Biograp (...)

19Historical battles and discoveries, in particular, had a profound impact on the young Muldoon’s imagination, so much so that the young speaker either imagines himself and his entourage in the company of literary figures (fictionalisation by association) or imagines that he and his family have become one of these fictional characters (fictionalisation by substitution). It could therefore be argued that Muldoon has staged his childhood memories according to his boyhood fantasies. As Jacques Lacan argues, “every autobiography is a fiction of oneself, a later reconstruction16. Thus there is a distance between the adult Muldoon (who is writing) and the young Muldoon (who is being remembered): not only does the author reconstruct his childhood memories in retrospect, but, by doing so, he also reinvents his former self through the prism of his imagination. Since most of these stories are coming-of-age stories, the overlaying of adventure stories on childhood events not only creates the appearance of fiction, but it also charts the young Muldoon’s progressive coming of age.

20In some vignettes, the “I” is either in the company of historical and fictional figures or has become one of them:

  • 17 Muldoon, op. cit., p. 52.
  • 18 Muldoon, op. cit., p. 53.

I would grit my teeth and brace
myself against the plunge into Owl Creek17.

I grit my teeth. I brace myself. It’s 1:43
by the clock
on the V.C.R.: with one bound

Peyton Farquhar and I will break free and swim across
to Librium
with a leisurely crawl and flutter-kick18.

21In these two vignettes, the “I” does not refer to a single referent. The poet aligns an event that took place in his imagination with a similar lived event, contemporary with the time of writing: while there are two identical images of a speaker gritting his teeth and bracing himself, one refers to the young Muldoon fantasizing that he is Peyton Farquhar’s companion and one refers to the adult Muldoon who has slept through a film (possibly William Wellman’s 1943 The Ox-Bow Incident, mentioned in the next stanza). The stanza breaks after “Owl Creek” and “one bound” mark, respectively, the transition from the fantasy to the lived event and then the shift from the lived event back to the fantasy. There are two possible explanations of this shift of first person voices. The 1992 “I” may have just slept through the film and dreams that he is one of the fictional characters of either Ambrose Bierce’s short story or Wellman’s film:

  • 19 Muldoon, op. cit., p. 54.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, The Ox-Bow Incident
I’ve never been able to separate
“occurrence” from “incident”, “owl” from “ox”19

22Or, we could equally argue that this “I” is not the 1992 “I” dreaming, but the young Muldoon, the 1963 “I” imagining himself on adventure trips.

23Another bewildering sequence describes the speaker’s journey with American writer Sylvia Plath and fictional character Jim Hawkins from Treasure Island. They are then joined by Morgan, an ex-pirate from Captain Flint’s former crew in Stevenson’s adventure story, and the 17th and 18th century real pirate, Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard:

  • 20 Muldoon, op. cit., p. 58.

While Jim and I were plundering the Spanish Main
from the Grenadines to Grand Cayman
she knew that even amidst fierce

flames she might yet plant centaury:
while Jim and I were sailing with Teach and Morgan
she was fixing the rubber ring

on a Mason jar;
even amidst fierce flames, the expiapiaratory rush
of poppies in July, October poppies20.

24The speaker and Hawkins are re-united later on when they crouch in “the apple-butt on the Marie Celeste”, which could either refer to the real ship or to the one used in fiction by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In another passage, the speaker is “hunkering” with American frontiersmen Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok who in reality met in 1871 in Kansas City. However, in the stanza that follows, the three men are on the unlikely “ramparts of Troy” with Hickok talking to Priam about the etymology of “saboteur”:

  • 21 Muldoon, op. cit., pp. 70-71.

as I head up a straggling caravan
of ragamuffins and rapparees
my rocking-horse’s halter fast-forwards through my hands.

To the time I hunkered with Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok
on the ramparts of Troy
as Wild Bill tried to explain to Priam

how “saboteur” derives from sabot, a clog21.

  • 22 Muldoon, op. cit., p. 66.
  • 23 Psychoanalyst and writer Frantz Fanon’s statement in Black Skin, White Masks bears strong echoes wi (...)

25In this vignette, the presence of the childhood toy—the rocking horse—indicates that these fictional journeys are more likely referring to the boyhood fantasies of the young Muldoon. The association of the young Muldoon with these literary heroes throughout the elegy thus creates the appearance of fiction. This illusion is further increased when the “I” is not merely in their company, but embodies one of them. This is the case when the young Muldoon fancies himself as the young Arthur “tug[ging] at the rusted blade of Excalibur”22. ‘Yarrow’ is thus not only about the elegised mother, it is also about the author’s whimsical and fictional journeys leading to the reinvention of the ‘I’23.

  • 25 Linda Anderson, Autobiography, London, Routledge, 2011, p. 3.

26Although Linda Anderson argues that autobiography “offers an unmediated […] yet stabilizing wholeness for the self” and “the possibility of alleviating the dangers and anxieties of fragmentation”25, I would argue that this could not be more different in Muldoon’s poem ‘Yarrow’, in which the poet explores the fragmentation of the self. The origins of this instability are mostly due to the mediation of autobiography through poetry, to spatiotemporal dislocations, and to the poet’s playful experimentations with the fictionalisation of the self.

  • 26 Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, qtd. in Fran Brearton & Eamonn Hughes, Last Before America: Irish and Americ (...)

27Muldoon’s poetry, particularly his elegy ‘Yarrow’, exemplifies the “fracturing of identity” that characterises contemporary Irish writing26. Although the poet magnifies his own self by using extensively the first-person voice, this self-centeredness does not guarantee the wholeness of the self nor the unity of the autobiographical self-portrait, which characterised some autobiographical writings and autobiographical analyses in the past. In fact, contrary to Lejeune’s 1971 definition of autobiography that is strictly predicated on an avowal of sincerity and truthfulness, what is at stake in ‘Yarrow’ is the fragmentation and fictionalisation of the autobiographical self. Muldoon disrupts the traditional straightforward identification between speaker, author, and character by juggling with several first-person voices often making it complex for the reader to identify the real referent. Because of the constant overlapping of multiple autobiographical portraits and the physical and mental journeys leading to the recollection and recreation of his multiple selves, this elegy may be read as a palimpsest of Paul Muldoon’s self-portraits and an illustration of the poet’s experimentation with the fictionalisation of the self, namely autofiction.

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Notes

1 Jean-Michel Maulpoix, « Table ronde I. La part de l’autobiographie dans la poésie contemporaine : un renouvellement », in Éric Audinet & Dominique Rabaté (eds.), Poésie et autobiographie, Tours, Farrago, 2004, pp. 19-50. Originally: « Là où l’autobiographie tend à centrer la figure, la poésie l’émiette, la disperse et la dé-figure ».

2 Qtd. in Earl G. Ingersoll & Stan Sanvel Rubin, “The Invention of the I: A Conversation with Paul Muldoon”, Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. 37(1), 1998, n. pag.

3 Clair Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon, Newcastle Upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1998, p. 158.

4 Tim Kendall, Paul Muldoon, Bridgend, Seren, 1996, p. 209.

5 This term was first used by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida: “I like certain biographical features which, in a writer’s life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features ‘biographèmes’”. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [1980], Richard Howard (trans.), London, Vintage, 2000, p. 30.

6 In L’Autobiographie en France (1971), Philippe Lejeune defines the pragmatic dimension of autobiographical writing by introducing his now famous autobiographical pact (or contract), which is a corner-stone of his theory. This contract revolves around notions of authenticity and faithfulness.

7 Philippe Gasparini, Est-il je ? Roman autobiographique et autofiction, Paris, Seuil, 2004, p. 49. The original reads: « Cette remémoration du lieu de l’enfance va souvent de pair avec une thématique de l’exil et du déracinement. Le personnage se cherche alors dans un va-et-vient incessant ».

8 Irish writer and critic Seamus Deane said that Muldoon was “in exile” in Princeton. In The Prince of the Quotidian, the poet replies: “To Deane I say, ‘I’m not “in exile”, / though I can’t deny that I’ve been twice in Fintona’”. Muldoon, The Prince of the Quotidian, Oldcastle, Gallery Press, 1994, p. 36. As for the year 1963, Muldoon decided to focus on memories of his younger self dating back to that “winter of 1962-63, [a] very bitterly cold winter, the winter Sylvia Plath died in London”. Paul Muldoon, qtd. in Ingersoll & Rubin, op. cit.

9 In James S. F. Wilson, “Paul Muldoon: The Art of Poetry”, The Paris Review No. 87, Vol. 45 No. 169, 2004, n. pag.

10 By “vignette” I mean a textual fragment that is isolated from prior and succeeding text by the blank space surrounding it (the way an illustration or picture would be) and by a page break. A vignette does not always necessarily correspond to a single stanza and more often corresponds to a series of consecutive stanzas (generally two or three) that are thematically related (their combination offers the reader a “snapshot”). I choose to use the word “vignette” for reading clarity. The entire elegy is composed of 150 short poems, each printed on a separate page. I therefore refer to each of these 150 poems as a “vignette”. Muldoon acknowledges that this formal arrangement on the page necessarily changes the reading experience: “I remember someone saying about ‘Madoc’ that Muldoon has written a very long poem and then somebody else saying, yes, but there’s an awful lot of white space in it. What we’re talking about is a typographical convention. The poem would change if it were printed in a different way—in numbered sections, for example. I guess ‘Yarrow’ would change too. The shape it makes on the page does make an impact, sure it does’. Qtd. in John Redmond, “Interview with Paul Muldoon”, Thumbscrew, Vol. 4, 1996, p. 16.

11 Paul Muldoon, The Annals of Chile, London, Faber, 1994 p. 43.

12 Emmanuel Laugier, “Table ronde I. La part de l’autobiographie dans la poésie contemporaine : un renouvellement”, in Audinet and Rabaté, op. cit., p. 40.

13 « Selon Julien Gracq, l’écrit autobiographique fait de son auteur ‘un voyageur avec bagages, bagages scabreux à déclarer parce qu’en chacun d’eux il transporte un squelette, un pimpant squelette habillé, maquillé et fleuri comme ceux des reliquaires romains : ce squelette, c’est lui-même, ce sont autant de doubles de lui-même, arrêtés, conservés, momifiés aux différents âges de sa vie.’ » Julien Gracq, Carnets du grand chemin, Œuvres complètes, Vol. 2, Liège, Gallimard, 1995, p. 1086, qtd. in Fabienne Gaspari, « Jeux de mémoire: Confessions of a Young Man et Hail and Farewell de George Moore », in Robert Ferrieux (ed.), La Littérature autobiographique en Grande-Bretagne et en Irlande, Paris, Ellipses, 2001, p. 306.

14 Muldoon, op. cit., p. 103.

15 Ingersoll & Rubin, op. cit..

16 Qtd. in Arnaud Schmitt, “Making the Case for Self-Narration Against Autofiction”, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Vol. 25(1), 2010, p. 127, my emphasis.

17 Muldoon, op. cit., p. 52.

18 Muldoon, op. cit., p. 53.

19 Muldoon, op. cit., p. 54.

20 Muldoon, op. cit., p. 58.

21 Muldoon, op. cit., pp. 70-71.

22 Muldoon, op. cit., p. 66.

23 Psychoanalyst and writer Frantz Fanon’s statement in Black Skin, White Masks bears strong echoes with this fictionalisation of the self in ‘Yarrow’: “In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself”. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Charles Lam Markmann (trans.), London, Pluto Press, 1967, p. 229.

25 Linda Anderson, Autobiography, London, Routledge, 2011, p. 3.

26 Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, qtd. in Fran Brearton & Eamonn Hughes, Last Before America: Irish and American Writing, Belfast, Blackstaff, 2001, p. xiii.

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Alexandra Tauvry, « More than Meets the ‘I’: Paul Muldoon’s Elegy ‘Yarrow’ »Études irlandaises [En ligne], 43-1 | 2018, mis en ligne le 30 mai 2018, consulté le 19 avril 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/5497 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesirlandaises.5497

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Alexandra Tauvry

Lycée Chateaubriand, Rennes. Alexandra Tauvry received an Irish Research Council scholarship in 2011 and completed her PhD thesis on Northern Irish writer Paul Muldoon in Trinity College Dublin in 2014. The aim of her research was to position Paul Muldoon's poetry within the frameworks of autobiography and autofiction. She is currently teaching English in Classes Préparatoires aux Grandes Ecoles in Lycée Chateaubriand, Rennes (France).

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