I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing – that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one’s door.

About Paul Muldoon

Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet.
He has published more than thirty collections and won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize.

More about the author

More quotes from Paul Muldoon

The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet

What I try to do is to go into a poem – and one writes them, of course, poem by poem – to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it’s going to end up.

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet

I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing – that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one’s door.

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet

Of course, you can’t legislate for how people are going to read.

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet

That’s one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one’s little turn – that you’re just part of the great crop, as it were.

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet

On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place.

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet

Obviously one of the things that poets from Northern Ireland and beyond – had to try to make sense of was what was happening on a day-to-day political level.

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet

I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy.

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet

I do a lot of readings.

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet

The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are cliches also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they’re not imposed, somehow, on the language.

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet

Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet

Frost isn’t exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet

It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed.

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet

Your average pop song or film is a very sophisticated item, with very sophisticated ways of listening and viewing that we have not really consciously developed over the years – because we were having such a good time.

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet

I was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. I lived most of my life there until 1986 or 1987.

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet

I’m sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme.

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet

I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say, I enjoy living here too.

Paul Muldoon

Irish poet