Postmodern Love: Duffy's "The Love Poem" and Muldoon's "Long Finish"

Carol Ann Duffy and Paul Muldoon represent a generation of poets who came to maturity in the 1980s and 1990s, inheriting both the Modernist tradition of formal experimentation and the postmodern suspicion that all language — including the language of love — is borrowed, recycled, and shaped by prior texts. Their love poems are self-conscious about the act of writing love poetry: they ask not just "What is love?" but "How can love be expressed when every word has already been used?"

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Carol Ann Duffy: "The Love Poem"

Context (AO3)

Carol Ann Duffy (born 1955) is one of the most widely read contemporary British poets. She served as Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2019 — the first woman and the first openly LGBT person to hold the position. Her poetry is characterised by accessibility, dramatic monologue, playfulness with language, and a feminist sensibility that runs through her work from Standing Female Nude (1985) to the present.