Description: In To Ireland, I, the Clarendon Lectures in English 1998, Paul Muldoon produces firework display of scholarship, wit, and intrigue, in an idiosyncratic wander through the alphabet of Irish literature. From a mischievous beginning in Amergin -- the first poet of Ireland -- Muldoon forges Link after link between the disparate and the unlikely, until modernists and medievalists appear as congenial neighbors on the half-lit, literary streets of Ireland. From Beckett and Bowen, through MacNeice, Swift, and Yeats -- and ever-guided by Joyce -- To Ireland, I tip-toes delicately through the long grass of Irish writing, pirouetting at borders, diverting streams, into a landscape of pure Muldoon: of brilliant connections and irreverent asides, of improbable alleyways and unconventional leaps -- but always a landscape of luminous engagement and genuine revelation. Muldoon's Ireland, shrouded in the feth fiada or magical mist of Gaelic literature, emerges as a strange estate, half-in, half-out of what he calls the fairy realm.

A provocative A to Z, with a particular emphasis on the continuity of the tradition, To Ireland, I is an extremely enjoyable jaunt through Irish Literature from one of the most important poets of his generation.

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