No one can doubt Paul Muldoon’s virtuosity, both as a poet and a reader. His command of verse, particularly of syncopated, broken metrical forms, has only come more and more into evidence as he has matured. The same may be said of his literary erudition, which is of the insouciant, punning, Oxonian kind — appropriate enough, given the formal wryness of his poetry. His two most recent books — “Horse Latitudes” (FSG, 120 pages, $22), a collection of poems, and “The End of the Poem” (FSG, 416 pages, $30), a compendium of the lectures he delivered during his recent stint as Oxford Professor of Poetry — run true to form, showcasing both his wide learning and balletic skill.

“Horse Latitudes” takes its title from its long opening poem, comprising 19 roughly sonnet-like sections, each assigned as a title the site of a famous battle or campaign, all beginning with the letter B: Brandywine, Boyne, Bosworth Field. (Mr. Muldoon pioneered this long serial form in his massive “Madoc: A Mystery” (1992).) Mr. Muldoon narrates, in “Horse Latitudes,” a series of vague sexual encounters with a woman named Carlotta, interwoven with meditations on history ancient and modern, including a few not so subtle jabs at our current involvement in Iraq:

“Why,” Carlotta wondered, “the House of Tar?
Might it have to do with the gross
Imports of crude oil Bush will come clean on
Only when the Tigris comes clean?

It should be noted that the “clean on” in the penultimate line rhymes with Xenophon, appearing briefly several lines above. This rapid, circular motion of image and rhythm, coupled with the sharp juxtaposition of the past and the present, is characteristic of the poems in “Horse Latitudes,” particularly of the incantatory “The Old Country,” which makes insistent use of the calculatedly obvious and dull cliché — “Every resort was a last resort / with a harbor harboring an old grudge” — to evoke the auld sod and the poet’s ambivalent relation to it. (Other poems in the volume, “The Treaty,” “Eggs,” and “Flags and Emblems,” take up this theme as well, all partaking to some degree of the same repetitive, fractured rhythm.)

As propulsive as this method is, it founders in the book’s last poem,”Sillyhow Stride,” a rollicking elegy for the American singer-songwriter Warren Zevon (who, prior to his death from cancer, shared with Mr. Muldoon a lyrical love of the strange and slightly disreputable) sprinkled throughout with appropriations from the work of John Donne:

… go tell court huntsmen that the oxygen-masked king will ride …

Altering the lines of one of English poetry’s greatest elegists to pay tribute to a thoroughly modern figure is admirable in conception, but the violence and speed of Mr. Muldoon’s theft (in the praiseworthy sense T.S. Eliot once used that word) detracts from its effect: “Oxygen-masked ” is an epithet too weighty and awkward for Mr. Muldoon’s music to bear.

This tendency to appropriate at any aesthetic price — a tendency that has dogged Mr. Muldoon, for both good and ill, at least since “Quoof” (1983), his fourth collection of poems — finds a different but related expression in “The End of the Poem,” his collected Oxford lectures.

“The End of the Poem” moves through its 15 chapters with dizzying velocity, each using a poem from the canon of the 20th century as the jumping-off point for a brilliant disquisition on what might be called the poem’s context — the historical or biographical impulses underlying it; its place within the realm of a particular activity, such as the translation of poetry; the web of literary influence putatively operating on its author. Mr. Muldoon takes on some extremely difficult works — W.B. Yeats’s “All Soul’s Night,” Eugenio Montale’s “The Eel,”Marina Tsvetaeva’s”Poem of the End” — and his lectures, delivered with an intimate command of literary history and of individual texts, are nothing if not fascinating.

But a serious flaw persists amid all the glister, a flaw that Mr. Muldoon donnishly (and perhaps to forestall criticism) draws attention to at several points: his love for what he calls, in his essay on Marianne Moore’s well-known poem “Poetry,” the “nomen est omen mode”—Latin for “the name is the portent.”He mentions this mode in connection with one Sam Formica, a furniture caretaker from whom Mr. Muldoon acquired his current desk. Mr. Muldoon not only finds echoes of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” in “All Soul’s Night,” but even traces of poor Georgie Hyde-Lees, Yeats’s consolation prize of a wife, in the poem’s glasses brimmed with muscatel (“lees” being the name for the bitter dregs that collect in the bottom of wineglasses).This seizing upon even the most trivial echoes and apparent cognates as evidence of influence and interrelation is daring, compelling, even delightful, but not really tenable as a modus legendi. (Such exegetical prestidigitation may be an artifact of these essays’ provenance as high-level lectures — it’s an unfailing crowd-pleaser.) Mr. Muldoon deploys this tactic frequently; it is most successful in close readings of texts, but far less when he ventures into the unfathomable realm of the poet’s character. And it is, unquestionably, related to his magpie’s eye for brilliances and curiosities with which he constructs his own poems.

Both books, despite their occasional frustrations, provide a great deal of pleasure: watching a virtuosic master at work in his particular discipline cannot but lift the eyes and heart of the spectator. And Mr. Muldoon’s unreconstructed affection for form itself, especially coupled with the great love he bears the poetic past — a love that almost every line in “The End of the Poem” evinces, despite its contortions — is particularly refreshing now, when such affections often give rise to whispered accusations of reaction and elitism. And for all Mr. Muldoon’s fondness for the incongruous, which has both helped and hindered him in his development as a poet, they are eminently worth reading.

Mr. Munson has written about fiction and poetry for Commentary, the New York Times, and various other publications.