Paul Muldoon was born on 20 June 1951, in Portadown, County Armagh. His parents Patrick and Brigid (née Regan) Muldoon had been living in Dungannon, County Tyrone, and the family moved soon afterwards to the nearby village of Eglish, where two more children, Maureen and Joseph, were born in 1953 and 1954 respectively. After Joseph's birth the family settled in Collegelands, County Armagh, where it would be based for the next thirty years.

Muldoon's parents both came from poor Catholic families. Patrick Muldoon's mother had died when he was seven, and his father remarried—in Muldoon's own phrase—“an unsympathetic woman.” Forced to hire himself out as a farm labourer from a young age, Patrick received no secondary education, and throughout his life could read and write only with difficulty. Brigid's background was also financially unprepossessing, but as the youngest of her family she had the advantage of sibling support. Her education at St Joseph's Convent, Donaghmore, and St Mary's College, Belfast, where she trained as a teacher, was partly underwritten by older brothers and sisters. It was her success in gaining a post at the local primary school in Collegelands which took the family in 1954 to the area of North Armagh now designated, by one recent literary guide to Ireland, as “Muldoon Country.”¹

Muldoon has described his father as “close to the soil—it sounds romantic but it's what he was.”² Following his wife wherever her teaching career took her, Patrick tried any kind of work that happened to be available: shepherd, navvy, farm-worker, shop-keeper, builder's labourer, and, as he is most familiarly presented in Muldoon's poetry, cauliflower- and mushroom-grower. Muldoon has noted that his parents were a toned-down version of the Morels in Lawrence's Sons and Lovers,³ and ‘The Mixed Marriage’ from Mules (1977) captures this almost geometric dichotomy between them:

My father was a servant-boy.
When he left school at eight or nine
He took up billhook and loy
To win the ground he would never own.
My mother was the school-mistress,
The world of Castor and Pollux.
There were twins in her own class.
She could never tell which was which.
She had read one volume of Proust,
He knew the cure for farcy.

Much of Muldoon's poetry embodies, and attempts to reconcile, the split inheritance of bookishness and agricultural life. However, despite comparisons with Sons and Lovers, he seems to have chosen different sides from Paul Morel. Muldoon has described his father as “anything but a coarse, lumbering man—he's very refined man.”⁴ Brigid, by comparison, is variously portrayed as narrow-minded, religiose and snobbish. There is still enough in Muldoon's work to indicate that his relationship with his mother was (and even two decades after her death, still is) far more complex than these passing negative references would suggest. Brigid died of cancer in 1974; written almost twenty years later, the oblique and agonizing elegy ‘Yarrow’ betrays an intense personal grief which can only now, it seems, begin to be salved.

The first four years of Muldoon's life, spent in Eglish, feature hardly at all in his poetry (‘The Right Arm’ from Quoof is a rare exception), but his short autobiographical essay ‘A Tight Wee Place in Armagh’ remembers them in some detail. One end of the house which the family rented in Eglish had been transformed into a shop by a previous owner. The shop sold Bird's Custard, Saxa Salt, bootlaces—“the kind of thing anybody could see nobody wanted, at least not badly”;⁵ Muldoon's father maintained it only in a desultory way, much preferring to chat with customers than to sell them anything. Most of Muldoon's memories from these years, however, focus on the back yard:

My sister running very fast through the yard, tripping, falling onto a sharp stick that went halfway down her throat. My father keeping a few hens … When one hen ate a crawful of hay he tied up her feet, hung her on a nail, opened her up with a razor-blade, removed the hay, sewed her up again with a needle and thread he borrowed from my mother, and sent her on her way.⁶

They kept pigs too, and Muldoon recalls his father spotting the pig-killer, James Blemmings, coming across the Oona Bridge a quarter of a mile down the valley. The children were kept inside, which seems only to have excited their curiosity about how the pig-killer “did it.” ‘Ned Skinner’ from Mules, although fictionalized and displaced onto an uncle's farm, is clearly inspired by the incident:

Ned Skinner wiped his knife
And rinsed his hands
In the barrel at the door-step.
He winked, and gripped my arm.
‘It doesn't hurt, not so's you'd notice,
And God never slams one door
But another's lying open.
Them same pigs can see the wind.’

During these years Muldoon's mother would cycle the ten miles to the primary school in Collegelands where she taught. Finally in 1955 the family bought an acre of land in Collegelands and built a bungalow on it. Muldoon's “uncle-in-law” Dinny McCool was a water-diviner, and had already pointed out the best place to sink the well; Muldoon recalls that he always felt the house was somehow an “afterthought to the well.” But when the mains water supply eventually reached the house, the well became defunct; it was boarded over and bricked up “like the door of a room where someone had claimed to have seen a ghost.”⁷

The area around Collegelands is renowned for its fertility, producing good-quality pasture and a wide range of crops from which Muldoon's father benefited as a market-gardener—apples, potatoes, barley, strawberries, cauliflowers, mushrooms. The “college” of Collegelands is Trinity College, Dublin; many of the Muldoons' neighbours were families whose ancestors had been tenants of Trinity College for several generations, up until the founding of the Irish Free State in the 1920s. The result is, according to Muldoon, “a little enclave of Roman Catholics living within the predominantly Protestant parish of Loughgall, the village where the Orange Order was founded in 1795.” In ‘Armageddon, Armageddon’ Protestant Loughgall is described as “An orchard full of No Surrenders”; possibly the religious geography of the area made the Catholic community suspicious, since Muldoon has commented that his family, being “blow-ins,” were always “a little isolated.” Certainly his mother's class-consciousness (“there's still something of the priest/doctor/teacher triumvirate in rural communities”⁸) did not help matters. As newcomers the children “were somehow removed from the place,” and the problem was exacerbated by their mother ordering them not to mix with their peers: “‘Stay well away from those louts and layabouts at the loanin' end,’” she commands in ‘Yarrow.’ Such isolation was offset by the all-pervasiveness of the Roman Catholic Church, which perhaps held even greater sway amidst a slight siege mentality. Muldoon has complained that

The Catholic church presided over almost every aspect of our lives, both literally—the building itself was two fields away—and metaphorically.

The experience was not a happy one. The Catholic Church is presented as repressive in Muldoon's work, and in an untypically self-revealing moment he has claimed there is “a very fine line between organized religion and organized crime.”⁹

Apart from the countryside around Collegelands, the most common backdrop for Muldoon's poetry is the nearby village of the Moy. The word “Moy” would figure largely in any Muldoon concordance, being granted at least one mention and usually more in most of his collections. The extent of this attachment can be gauged from the poem ‘The Soap Pig,’ which reports that during the late seventies, when Muldoon was living in Belfast, his flat came to be known as Chez Moy—a real home from home. The Moy even lends itself to Muldoon's poetic techniques: he grew up with the half-rhyme Moy/magh (as in Armagh), which as Blake Morrison has pointed out, sounds uncannily like one of his own inventions.¹⁰ Muldoon has also made clear a deeper engagement with the place and its history:

It's an area very rich in history and folklore, just as every square mile of Ireland is coming down with history and is burdened by it. The Moy itself was built by a man called James Caulfeild, who was at one stage Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Earl of Charlemont, which is a little sister hamlet to the Moy. This story may be totally apocryphal, but Caulfeild is supposed to have designed it on the principle of an Italian town, Marengo.¹¹

The merging of the familiar and the exotic in this account typifies Muldoon's treatment of his childhood home. His father's mushroom farm, the village of the Moy and the “brawling townlands” around it, become fixtures in his work against which to explore anything from psilocybin-induced hallucinations to sexual encounters with a syphilitic Cathleen ni Houlihan.

The 1947 Education Act, enabling the rural farming classes to pursue a secondary education, had ensured that Muldoon and his brother and sister would experience none of the difficulties in finding a good education that their parents had suffered. Muldoon's mother in particular was highly ambitious for her children, who were at one stage packed off to elocution classes and then piano lessons; each “failed miserably,” and the piano which had been bought at great expense was sold and replaced by a tape recorder. It was a worthwhile exchange: “we all sat round the fire talking into the tape-recorder and making our own amusement.”¹² Surprisingly, there were few books in the house; comics were frowned on, improving publications like Look and Learn and Classics Illustrated were subscribed to, but the only book Muldoon remembers is a copy of The Poems of Rupert Brooke, which his mother cherished because she had received it as a prize from her teacher training college. ‘Ma’ from Mules notes that “Old photographs would have her bookish,” before sardonically revealing the limitation of the pose: “She reads aloud, no doubt from Rupert Brooke.” Nevertheless, despite the paucity of books, as a child Muldoon still seems to have read voraciously. ‘Yarrow’ is, among other things, a homage to the adventure stories he consumed: King Solomon's Mines, The Sign of Four, The Lost World, Rob Roy, Treasure Island, ‘An Occurrence at Owl-Creek Bridge.’ Film and television Westerns were another favourite: Rawhide, Bonanza, and slightly later, John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn (1964), which, in its more sophisticated treatment of American Indians, alerted Muldoon's own sympathies. It is important not to underestimate the influence of film on Muldoon's poetry. He describes the technique of his Troubles masterpiece ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’ as “cinematic,”¹³ and employs Hitchcockian strategies (such as the famous “MacGuffin”) elsewhere in his work. Occasionally a poem's landscape seems to have come straight out of a Western: ‘The Field Hospital’ from New Weather, for example, is partly inspired by The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Sergio Leone's spaghetti Western in which “the civil war scenes must be a most faithful reconstruction of what it would have been like.”¹⁴

After attending the primary school at Collegelands where his mother taught, Muldoon progressed to St Patrick's College, Armagh, which was run by the Vincentian order. The dedication of New Weather to “my Fathers and Mothers” perhaps acknowledges Muldoon's indebtedness to the exceptional teachers he met there:

One man, Sean O'Boyle, who was a scholar of the Irish language and music, taught me Irish and gave me, and everyone round me, a sense of this marvellous heritage of song and culture in Gaelic. I was also blessed—it may sound corny, but I really do feel blessed—by a man called Jerry Hicks, a singer, who taught English. These were people whose knowledge exuded from them.¹⁵

Muldoon's intellectual and poetic development was profoundly shaped by such men. No doubt inspired by O'Boyle's teaching, his first published poems were in Irish, although he soon gave it up because he lacked “a real control of the language.”¹⁶ Another teacher, Gerard Quinn, introduced him to Robert Frost's work, which has remained arguably the largest influence on Muldoon's poetry. The poem ‘Gold’ from Meeting the British (1987) remembers Quinn's enthusiasm for Frost; and when questioned about Frost as late as 1985, Muldoon still prefaced his reply with the acknowledgement that he was “to some extent reflecting the ideas of my friend Gerard Quinn.”¹⁷ Muldoon was first encouraged to write poetry by another English teacher, John McCarter, who was willing to accept a poem in lieu of the weekly essay. McCarter had been involved in the Dublin literary scene, and gave Muldoon “the sense that there were writers alive in Dublin.”¹⁸ He also introduced his pupil to The Faber Book of Modern Verse, which Muldoon claims almost to have learnt by heart; and to the poetry of T. S. Eliot, whom Muldoon for a time thought “was God.”¹⁹

Believing there might be writers alive in Dublin may have been encouraging for a young poet, but a more extraordinary poetic renaissance was underway closer to home, in Belfast. Seamus Heaney published Death of a Naturalist in 1966; Derek Mahon's Night-Crossing appeared in 1968; and the following year Michael Longley's No Continuing City was published. Partly through his teachers and partly because of the considerable publicity it began to attract, Muldoon had become aware of the so-called Belfast ‘Group’ which had been operating under the auspices of Philip Hobsbaum since 1962; and he read each collection as it came out. Admiration was tempered with emulation: “These people were publishing poems about walking through fields and I thought, ‘I can do that’—it was a very familiar activity to me.”²⁰ In April 1968 his English teacher Jerry Hicks introduced Muldoon to Longley and Heaney after a poetry reading they gave at Armagh Museum. Hicks is said to have presented Muldoon to Heaney as a poet who would one day surpass him, adding in a whisper, “Rara avis.” The story sounds apocryphal—or sounds, at least, like it ought to be—as does the rumour that Heaney carried Muldoon's poetry around the literary circles of Belfast, enthusing to his friends “This is it.” Destined to become twenty-first-century thesis fodder, the relationship between Heaney and Muldoon has already begun to be mythologized.

However, Muldoon certainly did find his poetic elders welcoming. He had by now written dozens of poems, two of which—‘Thrush’ and ‘Behold the Lamb’—he sent to Heaney for his opinion. These poems both appear in New Weather, but neither is particularly successful. It is a tribute to Heaney's critical skills that he immediately sensed Muldoon's potential, and accordingly published both poems in an issue of Threshold, a magazine he was guest-editing. Heaney also steered Muldoon's work to Karl Miller, then literary editor of The Listener, and to Charles Monteith at Faber & Faber. Written around this time and dedicated to Heaney, Muldoon's ‘Unborn’ offers some insight into the elder poet's rôle:

Then the poem will live, will live
Outside my life.
I will wrap
It in paper. Leave it on your step.

It was not only Heaney whom Muldoon found approachable and encouraging. Michael Longley, for example, detected enough promise in Muldoon's work to mention him, in a 1971 essay on Ulster poetry, as a “particularly interesting” writer who had already produced “poised and original” poetry.²¹ Muldoon's early publication history is a record of extraordinary precocity and extraordinary luck. By the time he went up to Queen's University, Belfast, in 1969, he had already published poems in The Honest Ulsterman; before he left, in 1973, he had published a pamphlet with Ulsterman publications, a selection in the Faber & Faber Poetry Introduction 2, and, at the age of only twenty-one, his first Faber collection, New Weather, for which he had also received an Eric Gregory award.

Muldoon was as fortunate in his university as in his secondary school. With Philip Hobsbaum having taken a post in Glasgow, the Group had lost some of its momentum, but it was still operating when Muldoon arrived in 1969:

There were weekly meetings for a time in Seamus Heaney's house, and later in a pub, where new poems were discussed. It was very important for me, since a writer must be a good critic of his own work. There was no sloppiness in the group, everyone was quite outspoken. It was a very healthy kind of society, and I use the word ‘society’ to describe the group. It's scarcely a group at all, even though it's become a critical convenience to see them as presenting a united front to the world: you only have to read them to be aware of the variety. They're not united by any kind of manifesto.²²

Muldoon's friends from these years make a high-powered list: Seamus Heaney, who briefly tutored Muldoon at Queen's; the Longleys, of whom Edna has remained Muldoon's most persuasive advocate; the critic Michael Allen, to whom Why Brownlee Left is dedicated; and fellow students Ciaran Carson, Frank Ormsby and Medbh McGuckian. Remembering that Muldoon “was writing amazing poems when he was a mere boy,” Carson recalls their friendship during these years in a way which suggests that the legendary meticulousness of the Group was not necessarily inescapable:

On the odd occasion, he might show me a poem and I'd read it and say ‘Aye,’ or, ‘I think it works’ and he might say, ‘Aye, I think so myself,’ or whatever. And vice versa.²³

How far the remarkable convergence of energies at Queen's helped Muldoon's poetic development is, ultimately, imponderable, but there is little doubt that he has benefited from the sense of belonging to a poetic community, however loosely-knit: his switch from the past tense to the present when discussing the Group (“It's scarcely a group at all”) is not accidental.

When he was not writing poetry, or, by his own admission, playing snooker and drinking cider, Muldoon studied for a B.A. in English, with subsidiaries in Celtic and Scholastic Philosophy. He did not especially enjoy the course—which he has described as the “if it's Friday it must be Trollope” approach to English literature.²⁴ Nevertheless, references to Thomas Aquinas, Scotus Eriugena and the like, dotted through Muldoon's work, may constitute the remnants of his subsidiary topic; and the mammoth Madoc—A Mystery (1990) is, in passing, an idiosyncratic potted history of Western philosophical thought. Other events during Muldoon's time at Queen's did not go unnoticed:

Though my student days coincided with a period of extreme political unrest in Northern Ireland, I myself never took any direct part in political activity. My family would have had Nationalist or Republican leanings, of course, but were firmly opposed to political violence. I've often considered how easily, though, I might have been caught up in the kinds of activity in which a number of my neighbours found themselves involved. As it was, I preferred to try to come to terms with the political instability of Northern Ireland through poetry, often in an oblique, encoded way: in New Weather, for example, a poem like ‘The Year of the Sloes, for Ishi’ was written as a direct response to Bloody Sunday, 1972, a fact that may not be immediately apparent to many readers.

‘The Year of the Sloes’ is one of several poems which parallel the plight of the native Americans with that of Northern Irish Catholics. The passage is also suggestive of Muldoon's response to the violence in other ways: he states that his poetry is written only so that he himself can “come to terms with the political instability”—there are no grandiose claims for art as a midwife to society. The different course Muldoon imagines he could “easily” have taken signals more his interest in alternative lives than any real possibility that he might ever have resorted to political violence. Frost's ‘The Road Not Taken,’ a poem greatly admired by Muldoon, should be considered the starting-point for this obsession:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Much of Muldoon's poetry can be seen as an attempt to take both roads, one literally and the other imaginatively: his 1990 volume Madoc—A Mystery, for example, imagines what would have happened if Coleridge and Southey really had emigrated to the United States to establish their planned Pantisocracy. However, Muldoon's belief that he could easily have become “caught up” in political violence—with the image of entrapment lending the scenario a modicum of credibility—still seems one of Muldoon's less convincing alternative lives.

It was at Queen's that Muldoon met his first wife, Anne-Marie Conway. The couple were married during the Ulster Workers' Council Strike in 1974, while, Muldoon notes, his mother was already dying of cancer. The marriage was not to be a happy one, for which Muldoon blames his own “incorrigible immaturity”; a sequence of poems in Why Brownlee Left (1980) tells of the subsequent break-up and divorce. By the time of his wedding Muldoon had found a job as a radio producer for the B.B.C. in Belfast. He would continue to work for the B.B.C., both as a radio and television producer, for the next thirteen years, making a wide range of programmes including magazines, documentaries, and dramatized features on the arts in Ireland. Muldoon has given several reasons for his decision to leave the B.B.C. in 1986: dissatisfaction with the way the Corporation was developing; the feeling that he had covered the arts in Ireland to the point of exhaustion; his father's death in 1985 and the subsequent sale of the family home in Collegelands; and most importantly, the “realization that if I continued to work in television I'd probably never write another poem.”

During his time at the B.B.C., Muldoon's poetic reputation grew steadily on both sides of the Atlantic. For a first volume, New Weather had received an extraordinary number of reviews, and an ensemble of praise: Alisdair Maclean, in The Listener, was only slightly more enthusiastic than the norm when declaring that “There can have been few more impressive first collections.” Mules (1977) and Why Brownlee Left (1980) were each published simultaneously by Faber & Faber in London and Dillon Johnson's Wake Forest University Press in the United States. Again the acclaim was almost uniform: Anne Stevenson, Peter Porter, Peter Scupham, Douglas Dunn and Seamus Heaney all gave Mules favourable reviews, with Heaney declaring his friend “one of the very best”; and Why Brownlee Left, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was made quarterly Choice of the Poetry Book Society, was praised by Derek Mahon, Gavin Ewart, Andrew Motion, Fleur Adcock, Alan Jenkins and Peter Porter. The influential Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion and published in 1982, confirmed Muldoon's elevated status among his older contemporaries (he is the youngest poet in the anthology) by giving him fifteen pages—tied with Douglas Dunn, and behind only Heaney. The list of Muldoon's admirers constitutes a fairly inclusive Who's Who of British and Irish poetry; and clearly—often all too clearly—Muldoon has since become the poetic father of a new generation including Simon Armitage, Ian Duhig and Don Paterson. However, suspicions have sporadically been voiced that Muldoon is a poet's poet, innovative and technically flawless, but aloof from the common reader. Only with Quoof (1983), another Poetry Book Society Choice which won more plaudits even than earlier volumes, did sales really pick up, although Muldoon was still far from achieving the big-league popularity of a Heaney or a Hughes.

After the break-up of his marriage, Muldoon began a relationship with the artist Mary Farl Powers; the elegy ‘Incantata,’ published in The Annals of Chile (1994) after her death from cancer in 1992, is a powerful celebration of their life together. Aside from ‘Incantata,’ the influence of Powers on Muldoon's poetry can only be guessed at, although her print Pink Spotted Torso is the starting-point for the helpfully-titled ‘Mary Farl Powers Pink Spotted Torso’ in Quoof. Much of Muldoon's pamphlet The Wishbone, published by Peter Fallon's Gallery Press in 1984 and dedicated to Powers, was written around the end of their relationship, which it charts in an extremely cryptic, almost private style. As Muldoon has rather coyly commented, “around that time I was trying to write a couple of poems that brought to its logical conclusion the idea of leaving.”²⁵ Believing his poetry had taken a wrong turn, Muldoon salvaged just five of twelve poems for his next volume, Meeting the British (1987).

Muldoon's father died in 1985, and Meeting the British is dedicated to his memory. It seems feasible that Muldoon's profound, unproblematical love for his father made his death easier to mourn than his mother's had been eleven years earlier; certainly a comparison of the simple elegy ‘The Fox’ with the frantic and, at times, desperate evasions of ‘Yarrow’ would support such a conclusion. After his father's death Muldoon no longer felt “the same kind of tug” towards Northern Ireland;²⁶ but another reason for leaving the North soon presented itself. Several months later he met the American poet and novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz at an Arvon writing course. Between January and September 1986 they lived in Dingle, County Kerry, where, taking advantage of a small stipend from the Irish government-funded Aosdana scheme, Muldoon completed Meeting the British. He had also been busy in the meantime. In 1986 he edited The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, an anthology which, setting out to represent “the most consistently impressive Irish poets after Yeats,” outraged many of the prime movers on the Irish literary scene. In place of an introduction, Muldoon quotes verbatim—and without comment—an exchange between Louis MacNeice and F. R. Higgins, which MacNeice unsurprisingly wins. Having been told by Higgins that as an Irishman he cannot escape from his “blood-music that brings the racial character to mind,” MacNeice (and tacitly Muldoon) replies:

I have a feeling that you have sidetracked me into an Ireland versus England match. I am so little used to thinking of poetry in terms of race-consciousness that no doubt this was very good for me. However, I am still unconverted. I think one may have such a thing as one's racial blood-music, but that, like one's unconscious, it may be left to take care of itself.

However, Muldoon's editorial disappearing act infuriated reviewers less than the anthology's exclusivity. Within the confines of its genre the book is a masterpiece, tactlessly candid. Just ten poets are represented: Kavanagh, MacNeice, Kinsella, Montague, Heaney, Longley, Mahon, Durcan, Paulin and McGuckian; reviews also made cases for Clarke, Devlin, Murphy, Simmons, Boland, Ní Dhomhnaill and others. Deploring such omissions, Derek Mahon in the Irish Times hoped the volume would “sink without trace,” and wondered whether Muldoon had “lost his reason.” Mahon was not alone in imagining a Northern conspiracy theory, but in fact the anthology is the result of nothing more sinister than considered value judgements. Whatever arguments are made in support of other writers, the most striking, if understandable, omission is Muldoon himself.

Muldoon's absence from the anthology was to some degree rectified later in 1986, when Faber & Faber issued his Selected Poems; the American edition, published the following year by Ecco Press in New York, also incorporated a selection from Meeting the British. If the publication of a Selected Poems was a stocktaking exercise, Muldoon did not need long to take stock. Meeting the British appeared in the spring of 1987. Reviewing it in the Times Literary Supplement, Mick Imlah heralded the volume as “perhaps the most eagerly awaited poetry book of 1987”—no small compliment to Muldoon's reputation, given that Seamus Heaney's The Haw Lantern was published in the same year. But amidst the usual fanfare, no less a critic than John Carey, in the Sunday Times (London), wrote one of the most hostile reviews Muldoon's poetry has ever received, declaring it “tricky, clever, tickled by its own knowingness,” and comparing Heaney's “Derby winner” with Muldoon's “pantomime horse.” Carey's review has remained the most powerful and convincing case for the prosecution, articulating unignorable anxieties about what he calls Muldoon's “arcane, allusive poetry, packed to the gunwales with higher education.”

Having spent the academic year 1986-87 on fellowships at the Universities of Cambridge and East Anglia, Muldoon moved to the United States, where he married Jean Hanff Korelitz in August 1987. For the next three years he accepted various invitations to teach, at Columbia, Princeton, Berkeley and Massachusetts. But despite his switch from the B.B.C. to academia, and from Northern Ireland to the United States, he had not abandoned all links with his first employers. In 1989 the B.B.C. broadcast Monkeys, a highly acclaimed account of the events leading up to the arrest and subsequent acquittal of the businessman John De Lorrean; although Muldoon's input was “finally very small,” he had edited and adapted the transcripts of the F.B.I. and Drug Enforcement Agency tapes to produce a condensed, coherent narrative.²⁷ Muldoon returned to Princeton in 1990, to take up a lectureship. He has since conducted courses in Irish literature, in translation, and in modern British poetry, but is chiefly involved with an undergraduate creative writing program:

I suppose what I try to instill—although I don't like the word instil, it's not as if I have any particular wisdom in these matters—what I try to suggest is that [students] become interested in language and the adventures that they might have with language if they allow themselves to be taken over by the possibilities of language and if they are humble, as it were, before language. Rather than using language to—quote, unquote—express themselves.²⁸

Muldoon's career change seems to have produced the desired effect of allowing him to devote more time to literature. Within two years of leaving the B.B.C. he had published The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, his Selected Poems, and Meeting the British. These were followed by Monkeys and, also in 1989, The Essential Byron, selected and introduced by Muldoon and issued by the Ecco Press of New York. Muldoon had never made a secret of his admiration for Byron's poetry, and certainly the Byron described in the introduction sounds more than a little like a kindred spirit:

Byron's mature style is wonderfully discursive, ranging from Aristotle through hitting the sack to hitting the bottle of sack, while relishing the rhyme on “Aristotle” and “bottle” along the way.

The mixture of high and low culture, the weird but insistent logic of punning, and the sheer delight in outrageous rhymes confirm Byron as an important influence throughout Muldoon's poetry. Byron is actually the immediate inspiration for Muldoon's next volume, Madoc—A Mystery (1990); the 246-page title poem grew out of Muldoon's edition of Byron, who is often quoted and who actually appears in the poem on several occasions. Proclaimed a “tour-de-force” by Lucy McDiarmid in the New York Times Book Review, and “a dazzling achievement” by Lachlan MacKinnon in the Times Literary Supplement, Madoc nevertheless resurrected doubts about Muldoon's accessibility: many reviews expressed exasperation, and Bluff Your Way in Literature, as ever attuned to the fashions of the coteries, declared that “the mad Madoc—A Mystery fully lives up to its subtitle, being simply incomprehensible.”

Settled at Princeton, Muldoon remained productive. Having worked on Madoc daily for eighteen months, he began a more modest project. Following his children's book The O-O's Party, published by Gallery Press in 1980, Muldoon now returned to the genre with The Last Thesaurus—a poem about a small, linguistically gifted dinosaur (who, in an act of self-sacrifice, ends up being eaten by a Tyrannosaurus Rex). Then in 1992 came The Astrakhan Cloak, published by Gallery Press as a joint venture between Muldoon and Nuala Ní Dhomnaill: Ní Dhomnaill's Irish language poems appear on the left-hand page, opposite Muldoon's parallel translations. In January of the same year Muldoon wrote a poem a day, and the resulting ‘January journal’ was issued by the Gallery Press as The Prince of the Quotidian in 1994; occasional in theme, and not originally intended for publication, the book is an idiosyncratic insight into Muldoon's (sometimes transitory) views on subjects as various as U2 and Field Day. However, his major undertaking during this period was the libretto Shining Brow, commissioned by Madison Opera, Wisconsin:

Daron Hagen, the composer, and I were in the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He got this phone call from Madison Opera, asking if he would write the opera … He said to me—I'm not quite sure how serious he was—‘You want to write an opera?’ and I said, ‘Sure. Why not?’ So, that's how it started. This was Madison Opera's first commission, and they specified that it be an opera about Frank Lloyd Wright. I think they might have even come up with the title, though I no longer recall …²⁹

The libretto took Muldoon a year to complete, and the opera received its premiere in Madison on 21 April 1993. Aware that libretti usually attract scant attention, Faber & Faber marketed Shining Brow as “a dramatic poem in its own right”; nevertheless, apart from a long and intelligent review by Paul Driver in The London Review of Books, and an unsympathetic Irish Times piece by Peter Sirr, it went largely unnoticed in Britain and Ireland.

In July 1992, Muldoon's daughter Dorothy was born—“One of the most joyous things that's happened to me in a long time, I think perhaps ever.”³⁰ Published in 1994, The Annals of Chile includes poems about the gestation and birth—‘The Sonogram,’ ‘Footling,’ ‘The Birth’—which offset the predominantly elegiac tone of the collection. Publicity generated in Britain by The Annals of Chile suggested that Muldoon's reputation was entering a new sphere: Ruth Padel in The Times declared it “humbling and absorbing to watch an original intelligence, perfectly tuned to its time, swing into full maturity”; the London Magazine announced there were “few contemporary poets, if any, who can match his achievement”; and Giles Foden's grammar betrayed only the vestiges of circumspection, as he argued in The Guardian that “if [Muldoon] is not the greatest of contemporary poets working in English today, his influence is without doubt the greatest among the younger generation of British poets.” The Annals of Chile was awarded the prestigious T. S. Eliot Memorial Prize in January 1995, for the best volume of poetry published in Britain during 1994. Later in 1995 Gallery published a verse play, Six Honest Serving Men. And future projects were already being mooted: another collaboration with Daron Hagen; a film script—“a smallish-scale, modest film”;³¹ a critical—judging by ‘Yarrow’ and ‘Incantata,’ highly critical—poetic autobiography. Whether all or any of these possibilities will be fulfilled, as he approaches mid-career Muldoon has already displayed the Yeatsian gift of abandoning past achievements and remaking himself, finding new challenges. As he explains,

what I want to avoid is self-parody—a risk that all writers are up against in one way or another. That doesn't mean though that I'm interested in doing something different for the sake of doing something different, but I'm certainly not interested in repeating myself—or repeating a poem, whatever it has had to say.³²

Notes

1. Kavanagh, P. J. Voices in Ireland (London: John Murray, 1994), 34.

2. ‘Reclaiming Poetry,’ interviewed by Alan Jenkins, Sunday Times (London), 14 December 1986.

3. ‘Paul Muldoon,’ interviewed by John Haffenden, Viewpoints (London: Faber, 1981), 131.

4. ibid., 131.

5. Muldoon, P. ‘A Tight Wee Place in Armagh,’ Fortnight (Belfast), July/August 1984, 19.

6. ibid., 19.

7. ibid., 19.

8. ibid., 23.

9. ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon,’ interviewed by Lynn Keller, Contemporary Literature (Madison), 35 (1), Spring 1994, 17.

10. ‘Way down upon the old Susquehanna,’ interviewed by Blake Morrison, The Independent on Sunday (London), 28 October 1990.

11. Interviewed by John Haffenden, 130.

12. ‘A Tight Wee Place in Armagh,’ 23.

13. ‘A Conversation with Paul Muldoon,’ interviewed by Michael Donaghy, Chicago Review, 35 (1), 81.

14. Interviewed by John Haffenden, 134.

15. ibid., 132.

16. ibid., 132.

17. Interviewed by Michael Donaghy, 84.

18. Interviewed by John Haffenden, 132.

19. ibid., 132.

20. Interviewed by Alan Jenkins.

21. Longley, M. ‘Poetry,’ Causeway, ed. Longley, M. (Belfast: The Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1971), 109.

22. Interviewed by John Haffenden, 132-3.

23. Ciaran Carson interviewed by Rand Brandes, Irish Review 8, Spring 1990, 79.

24. Interviewed by Alan Jenkins.

25. ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon,’ interviewed by Clair Wills, Nick Jenkins and John Lanchester, Oxford Poetry III (1), Winter 1986/7, 18.

26. ‘Lunch with Paul Muldoon,’ interviewed by Kevin Smith, Rhinoceros 4, 1991, 77.

27. ibid., 92.

28. ibid., 79-80.

29. Interviewed by Lynn Keller, 3.

30. Muldoon in America, interviewed by Christopher Cook, B.B.C. Radio 3, 1994.

31. Interviewed by Kevin Smith, 92.

32. ibid., 86.