Best 25 quotes of Paul Muldoon on MyQuotes

Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry

Frost isn’t exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.

I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy.

If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride.

I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say, I enjoy living here too

I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme

I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing - that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one's door.

It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed.

It's not as if I'm trying to write crossword puzzles to which one might find an answer at the back of the book or anything like that.

I was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. I lived most of my life there until 1986 or 1987

Last year I was a judge for a prize in England, the T.S. Eliot Prize, so I read everything that was published in England last year.

Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.

Obviously one of the things that poets from Northern Ireland and beyond - had to try to make sense of was what was happening on a day-to-day political level.

Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place.

The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are clichés also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.

There's very little of the intentional about the business of writing poetry, as least as far as I can see.

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up

Your average pop song or film is a very sophisticated item, with very sophisticated ways of listening and viewing that we have not really consciously developed over the years - because we were having such a good time

This, then, is the beast that has never actually been: not having seen one, they prized in any case its perfect poise, its throat, the straightforward gaze it gave them back—so straightforward, so serene. Since it had never been, it was all the more unsullied. And they allowed it such latitude that, in a clearing in the wood, it raised its head as if its essence shrugged off mere existence. They brought it on, not with oats or corn, but with the chance, however slight, that it would come on its own. This gave it such strength that from its brow there sprang a horn. A single horn. Only when it met a maiden’s white with white Would it be bodied out in her, in her mirror’s full length.

Why Brownlee left, and where he went, Is a mystery even now. For if a man should have been content It was him; two acres of barley, One of potatoes, four bullocks, A milker, a slated farmhouse. He was last seen going out to plough On a March morning, bright and early. By noon Brownlee was famous; They had found all abandoned, with The last rig unbroken, his pair of black Horses, like man and wife, Shifting their weight from foot to Foot, and gazing into the future.