Faber published New Weather in 1973, when Muldoon was barely 21 years old, and his self-assured technical virtuosity was already startling. Yet for all the wit of the opening stanzas' self-effacing apology, the poem's claims were both grandiose and to some degree contradictory. I have, he announced in "Wind and Trees," a consciousness that is willy-nilly universal, but at the same time a special sort of vision that lets me see—and see through—metaphors. I reject violence (though it is both fascinating and beautiful), but it has given me the gift of prophecy. These are the boasts of a highly accomplished and very young man; time, it seemed, would inevitably administer a salutary spanking.

It hasn't. In Quoof,… the poet is as good as his word. In part, the new weather Muldoon foretold was a function of literary history. His was the first generation of Irish poets to come...