Paul Muldoon

Abstract

Paul Muldoon was born in Portadown, Northern Ireland, in 1951 and spent his childhood in the village of Moy at the border of County Armagh and County Tyrone—a setting for several of his poems. He studied at Queen’s University Belfast and published his first collections of poetry in the early 1970s. At the time of the publication of his first volumes, Muldoon famously enjoyed the mentorship of Seamus Heaney, and this biographical and literary connection has been a constant reference point in criticism, to an extent that other significant literary exchanges and influences initially remained underexplored. After working for the BBC in Belfast until the mid-1980s, Muldoon moved to the United States in 1987. Now a US citizen, he currently lives in New York and works at Princeton University, where he holds the Howard G. B. Clark ’21 chair in the humanities. Muldoon has published twenty-two major collections of poetry, nineteen chapbooks and interim collections, two volumes of critical essays, three opera libretti, song lyrics, translations, and children’s literature. He has been repeatedly characterized as a shapeshifting figure, whose work simultaneously reaffirms and undermines preheld conceptions of what we mean by “Irish poetry.” Thus, to propose that his idiosyncratic style and the remarkable complexity of his verse resists critical categorization is a case of stating the obvious. A reverse claim, however, might be more appropriate: that his writing embraces such a variety of categories that attempts at classification lose their purpose. Muldoon’s densely referential writing and his technical mastery of poetic language are matched by few poets of his generation, and the issue of how successfully his undeniable dexterity translates into poetic efficacy has been a persistent tendency in his critical reception. Muldoon has been, in turns, praised for his unrivaled skill and technical virtuosity or accused of his poetry’s evasiveness, perceived as a lack of social or political commitment. Yet, few would question that his verse has a place in any overview of modern Irish writing, modern English-language poetry, or experimental 20th- and 21st-century poetics. In the early 21st century, Muldoon’s perceived obliquity, or his distaste for direct political engagement with the crises of late-20th-century Northern Ireland, has made way to a more outspoken approach, in poetry as well as in public life. His work has been highly critical of the US invasion of Iraq, for example, and also tackled problematic aspects of Irish culture and history in an increasingly direct manner.