“The Most Promising Poet to Appear In Ireland For Years”

“The genius was there already,” said Mr. Seamus Heaney, speaking of the time when they met in Muldoon’s high school when he was only sixteen (Paul Muldoon Continues to Create By Lashing Outlandish Ideas Together; Smith, Dinitia; The New York Times). Paul Muldoon, a man from Northern Ireland, is a highly respected poet, who has won many awards, such as the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1996), T.S. Elliot Prize (1994), Irish Times Poetry Prize (1997), the Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry (2003), and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2003).  To write such poems and win such excellent awards, Muldoon found inspiration from metaphysical poets, especially Donne, a poet from the Elizabethan Period. Seamus Heaney is also an influence on Muldoon. He writes a lot of his poems in Gaelic, or with Irish slang. "I'm very interested in what happens when you take outlandish ideas and put them together in far-fetched comparisons. For many people, that's  a problem" Muldoon once said (Paul Muldoon Continues to Create By Lashing Outlandish Ideas Together; Smith, Dinitia; The New York Times).

Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in Armagh Country, Northern Ireland. His father was a laborer who couldn't write his name, and his mom, a teacher. When he was just sixteen, Muldoon met Heaney at his school. He and Muldoon started talking, and when he left, they mailed each other. Muldoon would mail him letters of his poems for critiquing. Heaney was amazed at the brilliance of his writings, calling Muldoon a genius for such a young age. "Nine is the ideal age to write poetry, you don't know what your doing," Muldoon once stated about himself writing poetry in his childhood(Paul Muldoon Continues to Create By Lashing Outlandish Ideas Together; Smith, Dinitia; The New York Times). When he was little, his poems were usually about his parents or family. As he got older, he attended Queens University at Belfast. Before he moved to the United States, he worked with the BBC as a radio and T.V. producer from 1973 to 1986, and was a poet by night. Muldoon's poems now are mainly about his surroundings in Ireland, or events that have happened there.

Now, Muldoon resides in near Princeton, New Jersey, with his wife and two kids, Asher and Dorothy. Muldoon is the Professor in Humanities at Princeton, and is also the director of a creative writing program there. He was also appointed the professor of poetry at Oxford.