Abstract: This chapter discusses Paul Muldoon's dealings with Byron and other Romantics in ‘Madoc: A Mystery’, and looks at the degree to which Muldoon interweaves a post-modern absorption in textuality with a post-colonial critique and emerges with a post-Romantic recommitment to imaginative power, here reconceived as fictive linguistic play. Muldoon is found to be more insinuating and indirect than Byron, for all the Irish poet's admiration for the Byron who relishes ‘the rhyme on ‘Aristotle’ and ‘bottle’’. The chapter explores the ways in which Muldoon delights in the ludic and autonomous life of his words, a delight that militates against the expression of unambiguous convictions. It explores how the portrayal of Coleridge, Southey, Thomas Moore, and Byron in ‘Madoc’ involves Muldoon in playful, darkly comic critiques of the Romantic. The chapter argues that Muldoon does not simply retreat into textuality, and contends that the poet breathes new, if post-modernist, life into the Romantic quest poem.

Keywords: Coleridge, Southey, Byron, Moore, post-colonial, post-modernist, textuality, quest, comic, rhyme,