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Paul MuldoonPaul Muldoon
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Critical perspective
BiographyPaul Muldoon was born in Portadown, County Armagh, in 1951. He read English at Queen's University, Belfast, where he was taught by Seamus Heaney. His first collection of poems, New Weather, was published in 1973, while he was still at university. He worked for the BBC in Belfast until 1986, before taking up a writer's residency at Cambridge University. He moved to the USA shortly afterwards to teach at Columbia and Princeton universities. He is Howard G.B. Clark Professor of the Humanities and Creative Writing at Princeton University. He became Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1999, succeeding James Fenton, and is President of the Poetry Society in London.
Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His latest poetry collection is Plan B, illustrated by the photographer Norman McBeath (2009).
Genres (in alphabetical order)Libretto, Non-fiction, Poetry, Translation
BibliographyKnowing My Place Ulsterman Publications, 1971 New Weather Faber and Faber, 1973 Spirit of Dawn Ulsterman Publications, 1975 Mules Faber and Faber, 1977 Names and Addresses Ulsterman Publications, 1978 The Scrake of Dawn: Poems by Young People from Northern Ireland (editor) Blackstaff Press in association with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1979 Immram Gallery Books, 1980 The O-O's Party, New Year's Eve Gallery Books, 1980 Why Brownlee Left Faber and Faber, 1980 Out of Siberia Gallery Books, 1982 Quoof Faber and Faber, 1983 The Wishbone Gallery Books, 1984 Paul Muldoon: Selected Poems 1968-1983 Faber and Faber, 1986 The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (editor) Faber and Faber, 1986 Meeting the British Faber and Faber, 1987 Madoc: A Mystery Faber and Faber, 1990 The Astrakhan Cloak / Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (translator) Gallery Books, 1992 Shining Brow Faber and Faber, 1993 The Annals of Chile Faber and Faber, 1994 The Prince of the Quotidian Gallery Books, 1994 Six Honest Serving Men Gallery Books, 1995 Kerry Slides Gallery Books, 1996 New Selected Poems 1968-1994 Faber and Faber, 1996 The Last Thesaurus (illustrations by Rodney Rigby) Faber and Faber, 1996 Hopewell Haiku Warwick Press (US), 1997 The Faber Book of Beasts (editor) Faber and Faber, 1997 The Noctuary of Narcissus Batt (illustrations by Markéta Prachatická) Faber and Faber, 1997 Hay Faber and Faber, 1998 Bandanna: An Opera in Two Acts and a Prologue Faber and Faber, 1999 The Birds (adaptation) Gallery Books, 1999 The End of the Poem: 'All Souls Night' by WB Yeats (lecture) Oxford University Press, 2000 The Oxford and Cambridge May Anthologies 2000: Poetry (editor) Varsity/Cherwell, 2000 To Ireland, I Oxford University Press, 2000 Poems 1968-1998 Faber and Faber, 2001 Vera of Las Vegas Gallery Books, 2001 Paul Muldoon in conversation with Lavinia Greenlaw Between The Lines, 2002 Moy Sand and Gravel Faber and Faber, 2002 Reverse Flannery: Magical Tales of Ireland Random House, 2003 Medley for Morin Khur Enitharmon, 2005 Sixty Instant Messages to Tom Moore Modern Haiku Press, 2005 Horse Latitudes Faber and Faber, 2006 The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures in Poetry Faber and Faber, 2006 The Fifty Minute Mermaid/Nuala Ni Dhomnaill (translator) Gallery Press, 2007 When the Pie Was Opened (illustrated by Lanfranco Quadrio) Sylph Editions, 2008 Plan B (illustrated by Norman McBeath) Enitharmon, 2009
Prizes and awards1992 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize Madoc: A Mystery 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize The Annals of Chile 1997 Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry New Selected Poems 1968-1994 2002 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) Moy Sand and Gravel 2003 Griffin Poetry Prize (Canada) Moy Sand and Gravel 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Moy Sand and Gravel 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award 2004 Aspen Prize for Poetry 2004 Shakespeare Prize (Germany) 2006 European Prize for Poetry
Critical PerspectivePaul Muldoon has for many years been regarded as Northern Ireland’s greatest contemporary poet after Seamus Heaney. However, since Muldoon’s 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), many now consider him to be on a par with Heaney. Muldoon is both a playful and a serious poet, and his work as a whole incorporates a wide variety of themes and subject matter, both personal and political, historical and present-day. His collections usually consist of both short poems and extended narrative works, and most of his early collections end with a long poem. His work is well-known for its ingenious and mischievous word-play, and he also experiments with the lyric and the sonnet form. He includes Frost, MacNiece and Joyce among his influences.
Muldoon’s first major collection was New Weather in 1973, when he was still in his early twenties. This was also the period in which the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ re-ignited dramatically. New Weather was extremely well-received by critics and highly acclaimed by Seamus Heaney. Muldoon’s linguistic dexterity was immediately apparent, as was his wry humour and his talent for depicting Northern Irish violence in an oblique way, while also exploring personal issues - in fact, Muldoon often shows intimate personal issues as reflective of the wider world. Critics were also keen to link him to Heaney (who taught Muldoon at Queens University, Belfast), for both are Northern Irish poets from rural Catholic backgrounds.
Muldoon’s second collection, Mules, was published in 1977. The title indicates his preoccupation in this collection: a mule is the offspring of a horse and a donkey, and these poems explore unlikely unions and juxtapositions. Muldoon’s mother had died in 1974, and Mules features many explorations of his relationship with his parents - this is something that was to become an ongoing theme in subsequent works. In this collection Muldoon continues to interlink personal matters with Northern Irish politics, and again this is something he treats obliquely. He is particularly interested in the role poetry has to play in politics and society, and the difficulties of depicting reality and ‘truth’ while also engaging in a creative and imaginative process:
'Look, son. Just look around you. (Extract from ‘Lunch with Pancho Villa’)
Bernard O’Donoghue notes that Muldoon’s early collections already embodied the qualities that pervaded his later works:
'[He has] a lively storyteller’s wit combined with a crypticism that fascinates rather than defeats the reader. The subject matters on which these technical powers have borne have been distributed even-handedly between the private and public domains: the privacy of sexuality and family relations, and the public area of Northern Irish violence and tension. [And] common to all his writing is a cool and amused eye, wryly observant.' (Chevalier, Contemporary Poets, 1991)
Muldoon is also noted for his sophisticated handling of poetic form and technique. His approach is both formal and informal, traditional and experimental: he makes use of the lyric poem and the traditional sonnet, but he plays with these forms and combines them with a style of language that is often quite colloquial and familiar. Most of his collections incorporate a diverse array of different forms and styles, along with an equally diverse collection of subject-matter. He is noted for his whimsical, tongue-in-cheek tone (he has described his own work as ‘whimful’), and for his innovative rhyming patterns. Muldoon’s work also abounds with obscure and archaic references and this, combined with his linguistic artfulness, has led some critics to regard his poetry as demanding and inaccessible. Others defend him against such claims: ‘The difficulty of locating the “feeling” in Muldoon’s poetry, of figuring out where he is coming from, is part of the experience of reading his work….’ (Clair Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon, 1998).
Why Brownlee Left was published in 1980, and its title poem embodies Muldoon’s love of open-endedness, for he prefers to question and explore (often with irony and mischievous humour), and to suggest things for the reader to contemplate, rather than making explicit statements or attempting ‘answers’. The question of ‘Why Brownlee Left’ is indeed never answered: ‘Why Brownlee left, and where he went, / Is a mystery even now.’ This volume also contains ‘Immram’, the first of many long narrative poems which Muldoon was to write in subsequent years. Though he has always been highly skilled in the technical craft of poetry and linguistic play, he is also a storyteller: ‘I’m very interested in the narrative, the story, and in wanting almost to write novels in the poem. […] And I’m interested in the dramatic persona. I like using different characters, to present different views of the world’ (John Brown, In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from the North of Ireland, 2002).
Quoof (1983), which includes one of Muldoon’s most well-known long poems, ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’, is often regarded as the most sophisticated of his early works. The word ‘quoof’ is the Muldoon family’s name for a hot water bottle, and throughout this volume Muldoon examines words and their subjectivity and unreliability. Though he does this with his usual mischievous humour, Quoof is also darker than his previous volumes, and explores Northern Irish violence and brutality more explicitly:
'Uncle Pat was telling us how the B-Specials and made him sing the Sash and curse the Pope of Rome. (Extract from ‘The Sightseers’)
Clair Wills notes the somewhat disturbing way that Muldoon links the personal and the political in this volume: ‘[It is] about how violence and brutality coexist with a sentimental vision of the family and the home, and may, indeed, be nurtured by it’ (Claire Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon, 1998).
Meeting the British (1987) and Madoc: A Mystery (1990) were followed by The Annals of Chile (1994), which won the T.S. Eliot Prize. Clair Wills notes that The Annals of Chile has a strong female presence and also ‘narratives of birth and death’ (ibid). There is a sense of accepting the circular process of life: this volume contains two long elegies, ‘Incantata’, for Muldoon’s ex-lover Mary Farl Powers who died in 1993, and ‘Yarrow’, for his mother. Yet, while Muldoon explores bereavement and loss, he also writes movingly of welcoming new life with the birth of his daughter Dorothy.
Hay was published in 1998, and continues to show the influence of fatherhood and family life, as well as the influence of American culture (he has lived in the U.S. since the late 1980s). It was followed by Muldoon’s ninth major collection, Moy Sand and Gravel. The Moy is a village close to where Muldoon grew up, though he comments that he has ‘fictionalised it to a great extent’. This collection in particular demonstrates the way in which Muldoon depicts the local as reflective of the universal, and the personal and private as reflective of the public and the political. He compares his fictionalised depiction of Moy with Hardy’s Wessex, Joyce’s Dublin and Yeats Country: ‘… these are places which are recognisable in their fixtures yet are changed by the creative process. I’m very interested in the way in which a small place, a parish, can come to stand for the world’ (John Brown, ibid). Moy Sand and Gravel, like most of Muldoon’s collections, incorporates a wide range of diverse subject-matter, along with the usual linguistic virtuosity and array of different poetic forms, as it moves from Muldoon’s 1950s Irish childhood through to the present-day with his wife and children in New Jersey. It includes a moving elegy for a miscarried baby and a re-working of Yeats’ ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’. Reviewer Ian Sansom comments that ‘Muldoon may be a poet in love with the possibilities of language; Moy Sand and Gravel demonstrates that he is also a poet in love with the possibilities of life’ (‘Awesome in Armagh’, The Guardian, 2 November, 2002).
Moy Sand and Gravel was followed by Horse Latitudes in 2006. Throughout this collection, Muldoon continues to explore fatherhood, but another major theme here is death, particularly the deaths of his sister (who died of ovarian cancer, which had also claimed his mother’s life many years earlier) and his friend, the singer Warren Zevon. Muldoon also confronts his own mortality and muses on the passing of time. For all its playfulness, Muldoon’s poetry is also quite hard-hitting, but, as he comments in an oft-quoted remark, this is part of poetry’s function:
'The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.'
2006 also saw the publication of Muldoon’s The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures in Poetry. In 2007, he was appointed the new poetry editor of The New Yorker.
Elizabeth O’Reilly, 2008.
Author statement'I'm afraid I can't come up with anything wonderfully witty and wise to say about my work, except to wish that it displayed a shade more wit or wisdom.
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