SOURCE: McNamara, Katherine. “The Riddle of the Expunged Words.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (11 December 1994): 13.

In the following review, McNamara lauds the symbiotic relationship between Muldoon's two collections The Annals of Chile and The Prince of the Quotidian.

In 1794, the English poets Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge planned to (but did not) come to America, meaning to set up a Pantisocracy, an equal rule for all, on the banks of the Susquehanna River. Paul Muldoon, an Irish poet who teaches at Princeton, nearly 200 years afterward, imagined what it would have been like if they had come West, and wrote a funny, tragic history of Western philosophy he called Madoc: A Mystery (1991).

In 1954, Ross Macdonald, who wrote his brooding, father-quest mysteries in Santa Barbara, said: “My fellow admirers of Coleridge will perhaps forgive me for suggesting that ‘Christabel’ is an unfinished mystery novel in verse, whose subject is...