Abstract

Of all the contemporary Irish poets, it is Heaney and Muldoon who have been most profoundly influenced by Frost, though in very different ways. This essay explores the two Irish poets' different imaginative and poetic appropriations of Forst and considers how Heaney's and Muldoon's different readings of their American father have influenced the development of their own divergent poetics of home. Where Heaney turned to Frost for reassurance, focusing on Frost's notion of the poem as 'a momentary stay against confusion' to bolster his own theory of poetic 'redress', Muldoon is attracted to the elusive, sceptical Frost who was suspicious of any kind of fixity or notion of origin, and who specialised in a poetry of indirection, ambiguity, playfulness and openness.