The End of the Poem

by Paul Muldoon

Published 8 June 2000
In his inaugural lecture, Professor Muldoon examines in detail the first stanza of 'All Souls' Night' by W. B. Yeats, written in Oxford in 1920, and considers the extent to which it might be a free-standing construct. He concludes that the poem is not so much an 'Epilogue to A Vision', as Yeats describes it in his epigraph, but an epilogue to a series of poems by Yeats's near namesake, Keats, including his 'To Autumn', published one hundred years earlier in 1820.