# 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. At Princeton University he has been both the Howard G. B. Clark '21 University Professor in the Humanities and Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. He held the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999 to 2004 and has also served as president of the Poetry Society (UK) and poetry editor at The New Yorker.

## Life and work

Muldoon was born, the eldest of three children, on a farm in County Armagh outside The Moy, near the boundary with County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. His father worked as a farmer (among other jobs) and his mother was a school mistress. In 2001, Muldoon said of the Moy:
   It's a beautiful part of the world. It's still the place that's 'burned into the retina', and although I haven't been back there since I left for university 30 years ago, it's the place I consider to be my home. We were a fairly non-political household; my parents were nationalists, of course, but it was not something, as I recall, that was a major area of discussion. But there were patrols; an army presence; movements of troops; and a sectarian divide. And that particular area was a nationalist enclave, while next door was the parish where the Orange Order was founded; we'd hear the drums on summer evenings. But I think my mother, in particular, may have tried to shelter us from it all. Besides, we didn't really socialise a great deal. We were 'blow-ins' – arrivistes – new to the area, and didn't have a lot of connections.
Talking of his home life, he continues: "I'm astonished to think that, apart from some Catholic Truth Society pamphlets, some books on saints, there were, essentially, no books in the house, except one set, the Junior World Encyclopaedia, which I certainly read again and again. People would say, I suppose, that it might account for my interest in a wide range of arcane bits of information. At some level, I was self-educated." He was a '"Troubles poet" from the beginning.
In 1969, Muldoon read English at Queen's University Belfast, where he met Seamus Heaney and became close to the Belfast Group of poets which included Michael Longley, Ciarán Carson, Medbh McGuckian and Frank Ormsby. Muldoon said of the experience, "I think it was fairly significant, certainly to me. It was exciting. But then I was 19, 20 years old, and at university, so everything was exciting, really." Muldoon was not a strong student at Queen's. He recalls: "I had stopped. Really, I should have dropped out. I'd basically lost interest halfway through. Not because there weren't great people teaching me, but I'd stopped going to lectures, and rather than doing the decent thing, I just hung around". During his time at Queen's, his first collection New Weather was published by Faber and Faber. He met his first wife, fellow student Anne-Marie Conway, and they were married after their graduation in 1973. Their marriage broke up in 1977.
For thirteen years (1973–86), Muldoon worked as an arts producer for the BBC in Belfast. In this time, which saw the most bitter period of the Troubles, he published the collections Why Brownlee Left (1980) and Quoof (1983). After leaving the BBC, he taught English and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and at Caius College and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where his students included Lee Hall (Billy Elliot) and Giles Foden (Last King of Scotland). In 1987, Muldoon emigrated to the United States, where he taught in the creative writing program at Princeton. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University for the five-year term 1999–2004, and is an Honorary Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford.
Muldoon is married to novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz, whom he met at an Arvon writing course. He has two children, Dorothy and Asher, and lives primarily in New York City.

## Poetry and other works

His poetry is known for his difficult, sly, allusive style, casual use of obscure or archaic words, understated wit, punning, and deft technique in meter and slant rhyme. As Peter Davidson says in The New York Times review of books "Muldoon takes some honest-to-God reading. He's a riddler, enigmatic, distrustful of appearances, generous in allusion, doubtless a dab hand at crossword puzzles". The Guardian cites him as being "among the few significant poets of our half-century"; "the most significant English-language poet born since the second world war" – a talent off the map. (Notably, Seamus Heaney was born in 1939.) Muldoon's work is often compared with Heaney, a fellow Northern Irish poet, friend and mentor to Muldoon.
In 2003, Muldoon won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He has been awarded fellowships in the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize; the 1997 Irish Literature Prize for Poetry, and the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry. He was also shortlisted for the 2007 Poetry Now Award. Muldoon's poems have been collected into four books: Selected Poems 1968–1986 (1986), New Selected Poems: 1968–1994 (1996), Poems 1968–1998 (2001) and Selected Poems 1968–2014 (2016). In September 2007, he was hired as poetry editor of The New Yorker.
Most of Muldoon's collections contain shorter poems with an inclusion of a long concluding poem. As Muldoon produced more collections, the long poems gradually took up more space in the volume, until in 1990 the poem Madoc: A Mystery took over the volume of that name, leaving only seven short poems to appear before it. Muldoon has not since published a poem of comparable length, but a new trend is emerging whereby more than one long poem appears in a volume.
Madoc: A Mystery, exploring themes of colonisation, is among Muldoon's most difficult works. It includes, as "poetry", such non-literary constructions as maps and geometric diagrams. In the book Irish Poetry since 1950, John Goodby states it is "by common consent, the most complex poem in modern Irish literature [...] – a massively ambitious, a historiographical metafiction". The post-modern poem narrates, in 233 sections (the same number as the number of Native American tribes), an alternative history in which Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey come to America to found a utopian community. The two poets had, in reality, discussed but never undertaken this journey. Muldoon's poem is inspired by Southey's work Madoc, about a legendary Welsh prince of that name. Critics are divided over the poem's success. Some are stunned by its scope and many others, such as John Banville, have professed themselves utterly baffled by it – feeling it to be wilfully obscure. Muldoon says of it: "I quite enjoy having fun. It's part of how it is, and who we are."
Muldoon has contributed the librettos for four operas by Daron Hagen: Shining Brow (1992), Vera of Las Vegas (1996), Bandanna (1998), and The Antient Concert (2005). His interests have not only included librettos, but rock lyrics as well, penning lines for the band The Handsome Family as well as co-writing the title track of Warren Zevon's album My Ride's Here. Muldoon also writes lyrics for (and plays "rudimentary" rhythm guitar in) his own Princeton-based rock bands. Rackett (2004–2010) was disbanded in 2010. Another of Muldoon's bands, Wayside Shrines, has recorded and released thirteen of the lyrics included in Muldoon's collection of rock lyrics, Word on the Street. His current group is known as Rogue Oliphant.
Muldoon has also edited a number of anthologies, including The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present by Paul McCartney, published in 2021, written two children's books, translated the work of other authors, performed live at the Poetry Brothel. and published critical prose.

## Awards

Muldoon has won the following major poetry awards:
* 1990: Guggenheim Fellowship
* 1992: Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for Madoc: A Mystery
* 1994: T. S. Eliot Prize for The Annals of Chile
* 1997: Irish Times' Irish Literature Prize for Poetry, for New Selected Poems 1968–1994
* 2002: T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) for Moy Sand and Gravel
* 2003: Griffin Poetry Prize (Canada) for Moy Sand and Gravel
* 2003: Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Moy Sand and Gravel
* 2004: American Ireland Fund Literary Award
* 2004: Aspen Prize for Poetry
* 2004: Shakespeare Prize
* 2009: John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence
* 2017: Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry

## Selected honours

* Honorary Professor in the School of English at the University of St Andrews (Scotland)
* Professor of Poetry at Oxford University 1999–2004 (England)
* Honorary Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford University (England)
* Fellowship with the Royal Society of Literature (England)
* Fellowship with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (US)
* Awarded an honorary doctorate by Trinity College Dublin in 2014 (Ireland)