Paul Muldoon The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Author-signed first printing. 9780374148102  406 pages. Volume is bound in quarter cream cloth and palid yellow paper-covered boards. Spine has stamped black lettering. Upper outside corners of boards are very mildly bumped. Book is otherwise in excellent condition. Like new dust jacket is preserved in paper-backed mylar cover. The author's signature appears on the title page.  "In "The End of the Poem," the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon presents engaging, rigorous, and insightful explorations of a diverse group of poems drawn mostly from the twentieth century, from Yeats's "All Souls' Night" to Fernando Pessoa's "Autopsychography" to Stevie Smith's "I Remember." Within this collection of fifteen lectures, delivered by Muldoon during his tenure as Oxford's Professor of Poetry, he reminds us that the word "poem" comes, via French, from Latin and Greek: "a thing made or created." He asks: Can a poem ever be a freestanding, discrete structure, or must it always interface with the whole of its author's bibliography -- and biography? Muldoon explores the boundlessness, the illimitability, created by influence, what Robert Frost meant whe he insisted that "the way to read a poem in prose or verse is in the light of all the other poems ever written." And he writes of the boundaries between writer and reader and the extent to which one determines the role of the other."