Paul Muldoon

Paul Muldoon is one of Ireland's leading contemporary poets. He was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen's University of Belfast. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States. Muldoon's work is full of paradox: playful but serious, elusive but direct, innovative but traditional. He uses traditional verse forms such as the sonnet, ballad, and dramatic monologue, but alters their length and basic structure, and uses rhyme and meter in new ways. His work is also notable for its layered use of conceit, allusion, and wit. The cryptic wordplay present in many poems has often been called Joycean, but Muldoon himself has cited lyric poets such as Frost, Thomas, and MacNeice as his major influences.

Muldoon is the author of more than 10 books of poems, including the 500-page collection Poems 1968-1998. His book Moy Sand and Gravel won both the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the International Griffin Poetry Prize. His most recent work, Horse Latitudes, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Muldoon's The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures in Poetry brings together the fifteen lectures Muldoon delivered during his tenure as Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999 to 2004. Muldoon has also written libretti, rock lyrics– for Warren Zevon, The Handsome Family, and his own band, Rackett– and many books for children. He edited both the Faber Anthology of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1986) and the Faber Book of Beasts (1997), and he has translated the work of Irish poets including Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill into English.

Muldoon lives near Princeton, New Jersey, where he is Howard G.B. Clark '21 Professor at Princeton University. He is Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts and, since 2007, the poetry editor of The New Yorker.
(adapted from The Poetry Foundation)

Online Resources:

Poetry Foundation profile
Muldoon's website
Rackett on MySpace
Muldoon on The Colbert Report (video)
BBC Radio 3 interview

Selected Bibliography:

Horse Latitudes (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux 2006)

Moy Sand and Gravel (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux 2002)

Poems 1968-1998 (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux 2001)

Hay (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux 1998)

The Annals of Chile (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux 1994)

Madoc: A Mystery (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux 1990)

Meeting The British (Faber and Faber 1987)

Quoof (Wake Forest University Press 1983)

Why Brownlee Left (Wake Forest University Press 1980)

Mules (Faber & Faber 1977)

New Weather (Faber & Faber 1973)