Paul Muldoon
Paul Muldoon is an acclaimed Irish poet known for his distinctive voice and innovative use of language. Raised in a Catholic family in Northern Ireland, Muldoon’s early experiences and education at St. Patrick's College in Armagh shaped his literary path, where he initially wrote in Irish before transitioning to English. His notable connections with prominent poets like Seamus Heaney provided a critical foundation for his work, allowing him to explore the complexities of identity and culture in his poetry.
Muldoon's collections, such as *New Weather* and *Mules*, feature a blend of autobiographical elements and commentary on Northern Irish life, characterized by a metaphysical approach to metaphor and layered meanings. His poetry often juxtaposes the ordinary with deeper philosophical reflections, as seen in works like *Why Brownlee Left* and *Madoc: A Mystery*. Over the years, Muldoon has garnered prestigious accolades, including the Pulitzer Prize for *Moy Sand and Gravel*.
In addition to his prolific writing, Muldoon has held significant academic roles, including professorships at Princeton University and Oxford, and has served as poetry editor for *The New Yorker*. His ongoing contributions to contemporary poetry include collections published in the 21st century, showcasing his continual evolution as a poet.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Paul Muldoon
Author
- Born: June 20, 1951
- Place of Birth: County Armagh, Northern Ireland
IRISH POET
Biography
Paul Muldoon was raised in a Catholic household in Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland in the townland of Collegelands near the village of Moy. His father, Patrick, was a laborer and a market gardener, and his mother, Brigid (née Regan), was a schoolteacher. This is the “mixed marriage” that Muldoon discusses in an early poem of the same title. He attended grammar school at St. Patrick’s College in Armagh where he studied Gaelic language, literature, and song. At St. Patrick’s, he also studied English literature. He began to write poetry in Irish, but he soon switched to English because of his better command of the language. Muldoon eventually sent poems to Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, two well-known Irish poets, and Heaney published a few in Thresholds.
Muldoon’s association with Heaney and other prominent Irish poets continued. Heaney was his tutor at Queen’s University in Belfast, where he studied Celtic language and literature and Scholastic philosophy as well as English literature. Muldoon studied under Heaney and attended weekly poetry gatherings in Heaney’s home. The group included the Ulster poets Mahon and Michael Longley, the critic Michael Allen, and other young poets. It served as a critical forum, and Muldoon asserts it was quite beneficial. Indeed, these gatherings may have laid the foundation for a poet whose work has evolved from finding significance in the simple to being simple yet significant.
Muldoon’s collection New Weather (1973) appeared the year he obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree and was published under Heaney’s shadow. When it was released, many critics contended that Muldoon was simply a younger Heaney. For example, in “Wind and Tree,” what seems a casual observation embodies more significance:
In the way that the most of the wind
Happens where there are trees,
Most of the world is centered
About ourselves.
Noted critic Edna Longley discusses how a moral and psychological condition reflected through the landscape is a mark of Ulster poets, but Muldoon takes this device in a different direction from that typical of Heaney. Compared to Heaney’s elemental analogies, Muldoon’s metaphors tend to be metaphysical and reflect correspondences that result from observations and occurrences—as in “Good Friday 1971, Driving Westward”—with layered, multiple meanings.
Critic Roger Conover speaks of Muldoon’s poetry as “see[ing] into things.” This introspection continues in the collection Mules (1977), one of the many collections published during his thirteen years (1973-1986) as a radio and television producer of arts programming for British Broadcasting Corproation Northern Ireland. Mules offers an interesting mix of themes. Muldoon still looks at the everyday in a different light, as in the poem, “Mules” in which his father and neighbor watch a mare and jackass mate in a field. Immediately, Muldoon thinks of the “gaunt, sexless foal” that will be born. His observation suggests the binaries of Irish life: North and South, Protestant and Catholic, British and Irish. Other poems in the collection are autobiographical and do not give themselves to interpretation. However, there are poems with a clearer commentary on the turmoil of Northern Irish life, such as the opening poem, “Lunch with Pancho Villa.”
In Why Brownlee Left (1980), Muldoon writes in lucid language. Many lines are beautifully crafted and deceivingly simplistic, and the great number of narrative poems make the collection an enjoyable read. Also, Muldoon’s commentary on Irish life is more convincing in this collection because he moves away from inflated rhetoric and bardic posturing. The final poem, “Immram,” is adapted from the medieval tale “Immram Mael Duin.” (The name “Muldoon” is a derivative of Mael Duin.) Widely praised by critics, this poem narrates a boy’s search for his father. Various literary influences are at work in this poem, from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s version of Mael Duin, to Raymond Chandler’s detective novels.
The plethora of influences continued in Muldoon’s subsequent collections. In Quoof (1983), named for his family’s term for a hot-water bottle, Muldoon references tales from the Netsilik Eskimos to accounts of hallucinogenic mushroom “trips” in “Gathering Mushrooms” as he explores perceptions and invites the audience to look at both the old and the new. The poems are deceptively simple, a trademark of Muldoon.
With Meeting the British (1987), published in 1987 (the same year in which the poet moved to the United States), Muldoon moved into a new phase in his writing. While Quoof tended to push its metaphors beyond recognition, Muldoon is more self-aware in this collection. This collection has less of a theme, but the poems work together as they juxtapose the exotic with the banal. Also, Muldoon experiments with new forms and methods of expression through language, most aptly illustrated in the ending poem, “7, Middagh Street,” which is the Brooklyn Heights residence of George Davis, fiction editor for Harper’s Bazaar. In the poem, Muldoon imagines how the famous people who visited there might have interacted. Muldoon’s use of words such as “quinquerine,” “flummoxed,” and “gormandize” as well as exciting rhymes such as “lemon/Ashmolean,” “Eden/Auden,” and “Minneapolis/nipples,” are a sampling of his command of the language.
In the book-length poem Madoc: A Mystery (1990), Muldoon looks for new ways to push his talents and develop his voice. With Shining Brow (1993; a dramatic poem written for an opera about Frank Lloyd Wright), The Annals of Chile (1994), The Prince of the Quotidian (1994), and Six Honest Serving Men (1995), Muldoon, who in the 1990s served as the director of the creative writing program at Princeton University, upholds his place in the literary world. He continued doing so in Hay (1998), Kerry Slides (1996), Moy Sand, and Gravel (2002). Terse and original, Muldoon’s poetry is full of multiple meanings. While seemingly uncomplicated at times, the simplicity of his language is deceptive. Constantly changing, Muldoon’s poetry offers a means to look inside what we may take for granted.
Moy Sand and Gravel won Muldoon a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2002 and the International Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2006, he published his next collection, Horse Latitudes. From 1999 to 2004, he was a professor of poetry at Oxford University, and after leaving that post, he published a collection of fifteen of his lectures. The resulting book was The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures in Poetry (2006). In 2007, he was made the poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine. He published his next collection, Maggot, in 2010. Muldoon continues to publish poetry collections in the twenty-first century, including One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015), Frolic and Detour (2019), Howdie-Skelp (2021), and Joy in Service on Rue Tagore (2024). Muldoon is a Howard G.B. Clark Professor of the Humanities and Chair of the University Center for the Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University.
Bibliography
Birkets, Sven. “Paul Muldoon.” In The Electric Life: Essays on Modern Poetry. New York: Morrow, 1989.
Doyle, Caitlin. “Becoming an Instrument of the Poem: A Conversation with Paul Muldoon.” Literary Matters, 11 Apr. 2024, www.literarymatters.org/16-2-muldoon. Accessed 9 July 2024.
Goodby, John. “‘Armageddon, Armagh-geddon’: Language and Crisis in the Poetry of Paul Muldoon.” In Anglo-Irish and Irish Literature: Aspects of Language and Culture, edited by Birgit Bramsback and Martin Croghan. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University Press, 1988.
Johnston, Dillon. Irish Poetry After Joyce. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985.
Kendall, Tim. Paul Muldoon. Bridgend, Wales: Seren, 1996.
Muldoon, Paul, and Robert Ballagh. “Paul Muldoon.” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/paul-muldoon. Accessed 9 July 2024.
Osborn, Andrew. “Skirmishes on the Border: The Evolution and Function of Paul Muldoon’s Fuzzy Rhyme.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 41, summer 2000, pp. 323-358.
Overton, Tom. “Interview with Paul Muldoon.” The White Review, July 2013, www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-paul-muldoon. Accessed 9 July 2024.
Robinson, Peter. “Muldoon’s Humour.” In Politics and the Rhetoric of Poetry: Perspectives on Modern Anglo-Irish Poetry. Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 1995.
Wills, Claire. Reading Paul Muldoon. Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1998.
Wroe, Nicholas. “Paul Muldoon: A Life in Poetry.” The Guardian, 31 Mar. 2013, www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/31/paul-muldoon-life-in-poetry. Accessed 9 July 2024.