Any Irish writer can hardly liberate his mind sufficiently from the questions of public duty to form and influence the opinion in Irish politics. And for the same reason almost all the contemporary Northern Ireland poets are under the pressure to lead his readers through the psychic hinterland to emerge from the Northern Ireland crisis. But the demands made on Paul Muldoon result to his persistent belief that poetic language is an abstraction of everyday discourse. Muldoon claims and testifies that poet's word can be used to the particular function of expressing the poet's intention: the poet's task is to control the meaning of the words in relation to the other words in the poetic text. Thus his poetry is to some extent full of fantastic and disconnected languages which, he seems to argue, comprise the actual experiences in the contemporary Northern Ireland. In this perspective his poetic languages tend to be the fragments of the continuous narrative and have different tones and styles. And his early poems seem to the readers to shift between different levels of meaning which keeps the poet's attitude toward the material and the context of the work. In this process his poetry is to create his own poetic world as a paradise free from the violent and corrupted real world as well as to draw links between poetry and politics. That means that his early works repeatedly figure out the relation between social and poetic significances of poetry and at the same time investigate the nature of poet's word as a way to form his own world. This seesawing attitude to the responsibilities toward the contemporary Northern Ireland makes his poetry tend to be oblique by detaching the poet himself from the society.

• 허현숙(건국대학교) | Huh, Hyun Sook