The End of the Poem contains the fifteen lectures delivered by Paul Muldoon as Oxford Professor of Poetry, from 1999 to 2004.Rather than individual and discrete performances, these lectures form a dazzling set of variations around the sustained theme of 'the end of the poem'.Each lecture explores a different sense of an ending: whether a poem can ever be a free-standing structure, read and written in isolation from other poems; whether a poem's line-endings are forms of closure (and where this might leave the poem in prose); whether the poem is completed only with the reader's act of understanding; whether revision brings a poem nearer to its ideal ending (when does a poet know when a poem has come to an end?); what is the right true end of poetry, and is the end of the poem the beginning of criticism, including an Arnoldian 'criticism of life'?