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A Study Guide for Paul Muldoon's "Meeting the British"
A Study Guide for Paul Muldoon's "Meeting the British"
A Study Guide for Paul Muldoon's "Meeting the British"
Ebook31 pages20 minutes

A Study Guide for Paul Muldoon's "Meeting the British"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Paul Muldoon's "Meeting the British," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 19, 2016
ISBN9781535828437
A Study Guide for Paul Muldoon's "Meeting the British"

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    A Study Guide for Paul Muldoon's "Meeting the British" - Gale

    6

    Meeting the British

    Paul Muldoon

    1987

    Introduction

    Meeting the British is the title poem of Paul Muldoon’s fifth collection of verse, which was published in 1987. Set in eighteenth-century North America, the piece recounts a brief trading encounter between two British military officers and a representative of an unidentified Native-American tribe. In this spare, eighteen-line poem, Muldoon creates a work notable for the multi-layered meanings of its words, its wry—and ultimately tragic—tone, and its stinging condemnation of colonialism.

    Although "Meeting the British contains actual, though disparate, historical occurrences, Muldoon weaves them into a single, unified narrative that functions as a symbolic indictment of the tactics of colonizers throughout the world. His poem’s title, however, singles out the British, perhaps because the subject of British rule is a personal and familiar one for Muldoon, a Northern-Irish poet who was born into a country ruled by Britain. That two of the poem’s lines are in French, is significant in that it is a secondary language for the speaker. This sense of discomfort at using the subjugator’s tongue is paralleled by the fact that Muldoon reaches a large audience by writing in English, rather than his native Irish Gaelic language.

    Author Biography

    Paul Muldoon was born in Portadown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, in 1951. His mother was a schoolteacher, and his father was a laborer and market gardener. In the grammar school of St. Patrick’s College in Armagh, teachers introduced Muldoon to Irish language and music. He also discovered The Faber Book of Modern Verse and, most important, the work of poet T. S. Eliot. All of these events had a powerful influence on Muldoon, and at the age of seventeen,

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