MULDOON, Paul

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Nationality: Irish. Born: County Armagh, Northern Ireland, 20 June 1951. Education: St. Patrick's College, Armagh; Queen's University, Belfast. Family: Married Jean Hanff Korelitz in 1987; one daughter. Career: Radio and television producer, BBC Northern Ireland, 1973–86; Judith E. Wilson Fellow, Cambridge University, 1986–87; writing fellow, University of East Anglia, Norwich, 1987; visiting professor, Columbia University, New York, 1987–88, and Princeton University, New Jersey, 1987–88; writer-in-residence, YMHA, New York, 1988; Roberta Holloway Lecturer, University of California, Berkeley, 1989; visiting professor, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1989–90. Since 1990 lecturer, since 1993 director of creative writing program, and since 1995 professor, Princeton University. Awards: Eric Gregory award, 1972; Faber memorial prize, 1982; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial fellow, 1990; Geoffrey Faber award, 1991; T.S. Eliot prize, 1994; Academy award in literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1996; Irish Times prize for poetry, 1997. Address: Princeton University, Creative Writing Program, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Knowing My Place. Belfast, Ulsterman, 1971.

New Weather. London, Faber, 1973.

Spirit of Dawn. Belfast, Ulsterman, 1975.

Mules. London, Faber, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Wake Forest University Press, 1977.

Names and Addresses. Belfast, Ulsterman, 1978.

Why Brownlee Left. London, Faber, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Wake Forest University Press, 1980.

Immram. Dublin, Gallery Press, 1980.

The O-Os' Party. Dublin, Gallery Press, 1980.

Out of Siberia. Dublin, Gallery Press, and Deerfield, Massachusetts, Deerfield Press, 1982.

Quoof. London, Faber, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Wake Forest University Press, 1983.

The Wishbone. Dublin, Gallery Press, 1984.

Selected Poems 1968–1983. London, Faber, 1986; New York, Ecco Press, 1987.

Meeting the British. London, Faber, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Wake Forest University Press, 1987.

Madoc: A Mystery. London, Faber, 1990.

Shining Brow. London, Faber, 1993.

The Annals of Chile. London, Faber, and New York, Farrar Straus, 1994.

Kerry Slides. Loughcrew, Oldcastle, Ireland, Gallery Press, 1996.

The Noctuary of Narcussus Batt. London and Boston, Faber, 1997.

Hay. London, Faber, and New York, Farrar Straus, 1998.

Play

Television Play: Monkeys, 1989.

Other

Editor, The Scrake of Dawn: Poems by Young People from Northern Ireland. Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 1979.

Editor, The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry. London, Faber, 1986.

Editor, The Essential Byron. New York, Ecco Press, 1989.

Editor, The Faber Book of Beasts. London and Boston, Faber, 1997.

Editor, Bandanna: An Opera in Two Acts and a Prologue, by Daron Hagen. London, Faber, 1999.

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Critical Studies: By Mary DeShazer, in Concerning Poetry (Bellingham, Washington), 14(2), fall 1981; "Juniper, Otherwise Known: Poems by Paulin and Muldoon" by Adrian Frazier, in Eire-Ireland (St. Paul, Minnesota), 19(1), spring 1984; "Paul Muldoon and the Poetics of Sexual Difference," in Contemporary Literature (Madison, Wisconsin), 28(3), fall 1987, and "Yeats, Muldoon, and Heroic History," in Learning the Trade: Essays on W.B. Yeats and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Deborah Fleming, West Cornwall, Connecticut, Locust Hill, 1993, both by William A. Wilson; "'Armageddon, Armagh-geddon': Language and Crisis in the Poetry of Paul Muldoon" by John Goodby, in Anglo-Irish and Irish Literature: Aspects of Language and Culture, edited by Birgit Bramsback and Martin Croghan, Uppsala, Uppsala University, 1988; "Threaders of Double-Stranded Words: News from the North of Ireland" by John Drexel, in New England Review (Middlebury, Vermont), 12(2), winter 1989; "Poetic Forms and Social Malformations" by Edna Longley, in Tradition and Influence in Anglo-Irish Poetry, edited by Terence Brown and Nicholas Grene, Totowa, New Jersey, Barnes and Noble, 1989; "A Northern Perspective: Dual Vision in the Poetry of Paul Muldoon" by Kathleen McCracken, in Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (Saskatoon, Canada), 16(2), December 1990; "Bog Poems and Book Poems; Doubleness, Self-Translation, and Pun in Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon" by Richard Brown, in The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland, edited by Neil Corcoran, Bridgend, Seren, 1992; The Celtic Otherworld and Contemporary Irish Poetry (dissertation) by Thomas Royster Howerton, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1993; "Hermeneutic Hermeticism: Paul Muldoon and the Northern Irish Poetic" by John Goodby, in In Black and Gold: Contiguous Traditions in Post-War British and Irish Poetry, edited by C.C. Barfoot, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1994; "'Everything Provisional': Fictive Possibility and the Poetry of Paul Muldoon and Ciaran Carson" by Jonathan Allison, in Etudes Irlandaises (Sainghinen en Melantois, France), 20(2), autumn 1995; Paul Muldoon by Tim Kendall, Bridgend, Wales, Seren, and Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, Dufour, 1996; Northern Exposures: Politics, Pressure and Tradition in the Poetry of Montague, Heaney, and Muldoon (dissertation) by Kevin Brady, Drew University, 1996; "Muldoon's Humor" by Peter Robinson, in Shiron (Japan), 35, June 1996; "Obliquity in the Poetry of Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian" by Shane Murphy, in Eire-Ireland (St. Paul, Minnesota), 31(3–4), fall-winter 1996; "Paul Muldoon: A Postmodern Ulysses?" by Carol Tell, in The Classical World and the Mediterranean, edited by Giuseppe Serpillo and Donatella Badin, Cagliari, Italy, Tema, 1996; "'Some Sweet Disorder'—The Poetry of Subversion: Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuckian" by Elmer Andrews, in British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s: Politics and Art, edited by Gary Day and Brian Docherty, London, Macmillan, and New York, St. Martin's Press, 1997; Reading Paul Muldoon by Clair Wills, Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, and Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, Dufour, 1998.

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Paul Muldoon's poetic career made a precocious start and has sustained a prodigious pace. His first collection, New Weather, was well received when he was twenty-two, and in an influential and enthusiastic review of his second collection, Mules, Seamus Heaney concluded that Muldoon was "one of the very best." The qualities that characterized the early volumes have remained his hallmark—a lively storyteller's wit combined with a cryptic element that fascinates rather than defeats the reader. The subject matter on which these technical powers have been brought to bear has been distributed evenhandedly between the private and public domains: the privacy of sexuality and family relations, and the public area of Northern Irish violence and tension. But this is to separate off his subjects too neatly, for common to all his writing is a cool and amused eye, wryly observant. As with many writers in the Irish tradition, meaning is produced more by concern with form than with substance, and there is a delight in the suggested rather than the declamatory.

Although the writers Muldoon himself pays tribute to as influences are exponents of the lyric (Thomas, Frost, MacNeice), a striking feature of his work is the tendency to use the lyric to build toward larger units, characteristic of the major modernist-symbolist poets of the early part of the twentieth century, Yeats and Eliot. (Muldoon says that in his student days he thought the latter was God.) In particular Muldoon develops Yeats's practice of making each single volume of poetry a consistent symbolic statement. But Muldoon is a symbolist with a difference; his symbols are not received or traditional (the rose, the swan, the sword) but new: mushrooms, American Indians, mules, figures from the cinema. Sometimes these are transparent (for instance, mules as figures of the various unresolved dualities in Northern Ireland, unsuccessfully matched), but more often they are private and left open-ended ("quoof" was the family term for a hot-water bottle). What is most characteristic of him is to write in innocent, transparent language but with unclear meaning. He greatly reveres Joyce and is influenced by him in various linguistic effects, in particular the way his usage responds to the auditory as much as the semantic, but the general effect of his language is the opposite of Joyce's. Whereas Finnegans Wake distorts word forms by packing several meanings into a single unit, Muldoon uses traditional words, with apparently straightforward senses, to uncertain purpose.

Because of this the center of Muldoon's poetic worldview is a kind of metaphysics of doubt, not surprising perhaps in the context of Northern Ireland, where the most strongly held views are not necessarily the most worthy of credence. A typical, elegant occurrence of this comes at the end of the poem "History," in Why Brownlee Left:

Into the room where MacNeice wrote 'Snow',
Or the room where they say he wrote 'Snow'.

The poems that develop this open-endedness most strikingly, and that advance on the structure of a Yeats volume, are the long poems with which Muldoon ends his books. Possibly the most successful of these is "The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants" in Quoof. This brilliant, rambling narrative, corresponding to "Immram" in Why Brownlee Left, draws on details of Northern Irish violence in a series of forty-nine fourteen-line poems, playing artfully with the structure of the sonnet and ending with an item outside the sonnet-based structure ("Huh"), a negative comment, it seems, on the certainty or advisability of any such enterprise. Within this doubtful framework Muldoon runs through his repertoire of Joycean linguistic devices, including the associative runs of phonetically or semantically echoing words (Gallogly, Gollogly, Golightly, Ingoldsby, English) and his playing off of clichés against more traditionally poetic registers.

But Muldoon is by no means only a player of games. For example, few poems have expressed more eloquently the desolation of Northern Irish life than has "Aisling" in Quoof. For a poet who has been accused of evasiveness or of being ivory-towerish, he refers a great deal to such sensitive areas as "our Protestant neighbour," "the British," or the IRA hunger strikers. Within its formal peculiarities the poetry strongly suggests observed reality in its nonassertiveness. The universal authority of poetic judgment is declined in a way that claims to see what can be seen objectively from the outside, no more, no less.

Above all, behind the apparent whimsy and caution and formal playing, Muldoon has an exceptional lyric gift, justifying his claims of descent from MacNeice but perhaps surpassing the master. Two examples might be noted. The first is the title poem of the collection Why Brownlee Left, an essay in a familiar modern genre, the empty parable that waits to be invested with the reader's meaning. The question of why Brownlee left is entirely open at the end, looking to the future for an answer, no more assertive than his horses,

	like man and wife,
Shifting their weight from foot to
Foot, and gazing into the future.

Another example of his lyric gift is "The Fox," an elegy for his father in Meeting the British, outstanding even in an age of excellent elegies because of its simplicity and compassion.

What it proves is that Muldoon has the technique to turn successfully to any poetic area, even one as remote as this from his reserved and canny narrations.

—Bernard O'Donoghue