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
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
Believe it or not, one of the first poets I was aware of was Yeats. I recited ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ at a verse speaking competition when I was eight or nine. – Paul Muldoon
I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on. – Paul Muldoon
I met Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley on the same day in 1968. I was sixteen at the time. Very exciting. They were reading at Armagh. One of my teachers brought me to meet them, introduced me, and I became friends with them. – Paul Muldoon
One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way. – Paul Muldoon
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
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
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
I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they’re not imposed, somehow, on the language. – Paul Muldoon
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
I was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. I lived most of my life there until 1986 or 1987. – Paul Muldoon
For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry. – Paul Muldoon
Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent. – Paul Muldoon
At high school, instead of the weekly essay, I would write a poem, and the teacher accepted that. The impulse was one of laziness, I’m certain. Poems were shorter than essays. – Paul Muldoon
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
The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives. – Paul Muldoon
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
Frost isn’t exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was. – Paul Muldoon
