Paul Muldoon

Paul Muldoon (born June 20, 1951, Portadown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland) is a Northern Irish poet whose oeuvre covers both intensely personal and political terrain—from his wife’s miscarriage to the conflict in Northern Ireland. He won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Moy Sand and Gravel (2002).

Early life

The eldest of three children, Muldoon was raised on a farm near the border of the Counties Armagh and Tyrone in Northern Ireland. Muldoon’s father, Patrick Muldoon, was a laborer and gardener. His mother, Brigid Regan, was a schoolteacher. He began writing poems in his teenage years and went on to study at Queen’s University, Belfast, where he was tutored by poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney. At age 19, he completed his first collection of poems, the chapbook Knowing My Place (1971). In 1973 he published his first full-length collection of poems, New Weather. That same year he graduated from college and then worked for BBC Belfast as a radio and television producer until 1986.

Teaching and editing career

Following the death of his father in 1987, Muldoon immigrated to the United States. He and his family settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where he taught creative writing and became Howard G.B. Clark ’21 Professor in the Humanities and chair of both the Fund for Irish Studies and the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. He also served as honorary professor of poetry (1999–2004) at the University of Oxford, and in 2007–17 he was poetry editor of The New Yorker.

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Poetry

Some of Muldoon’s poetry explores elaborate imaginary encounters between historical figures, including one between Lord Byron and Thomas Jefferson. Muldoon challenges himself to work within tight poetic forms such as haiku, sestina, and sonnet. He has suggested that he intentionally writes poems that seem spontaneous and clear at first but that reveal deeper significances upon closer inspection.

Muldoon’s many collections include Mules (1977), Meeting the British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), New Selected Poems, 1968–94 (1996), Hay (1998), Poems 1968–1998 (2001), Plan B (2009, a collaboration with the photographer Norman McBeath), Maggot (2010), The Word on the Street: Rock Lyrics (2013), One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015), and Frolic and Detour (2019). Moy Sand and Gravel (2002) reaped both the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Griffin Poetry Prize for an international writer in 2003. In 2021 Muldoon published the collection Howdie-Skelp, which includes a series of sonnets addressing the COVID-19 pandemic and an elegy to his friend and fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, who had died in 2019.

Other works

Muldoon has also published poetry criticism, including The End of the Poem (2006). He collaborated with the American songwriter Warren Zevon on the album My Ride’s Here (2002) and wrote the librettos for operas by the American composer Daron Hagen, including Vera of Las Vegas (2001). Muldoon has translated several collections by the Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and published a book of his translations of 18th-century Irish poetry, Lamentations (2017). Among his other works are the children’s books The Last Thesaurus (1995) and Reverse Flannery (2003); the teleplay Monkeys (1989, directed by Danny Boyle); and a collection of lectures on Irish literature, To Ireland, I (2000). In 2021 Muldoon edited The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, a collection of the song lyrics of Paul McCartney accompanied with commentaries by the former Beatle.