Whose poetry informs your work? Paul Muldoon | Big Think

Whose poetry informs your work?

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Everything from Irish song to Yevgeny Evtushenko.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Paul Muldoon:

Paul Muldoon is a writer, academic and educator, as well as Pulitzer Prize-winning poet from County Armagh, Northern Ireland. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor at Princeton University and Chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts. In 2007 he was appointed Poetry Editor of The New Yorker. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary Fellow of Hertford College. He won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for this work, Moy Sand and Gravel (2002).

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996. Other recent awards are the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2005 Aspen Prize for Poetry, and the 2006 European Prize for Poetry. He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as "the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Whose poetry informs your work?

Paul Muldoon: There was so much poetry that was influential, from so many eras, and from so many traditions.

For example, there was the immediate tradition, the Irish tradition--I talked little bit about Irish language earlier on--with that, of course, came a massive tradition of literature that we were reared in, we were brought up in it.

In the homes there were people certainly still singing songs, stories; stories and songs that had components of that culture. But also at school, of course, as we are learning Irish, we learned it predominately through song.

As it happens, Irish poetry and Irish song were in many cases indistinguishable. So we learned all that. And the great Irish texts, we learned. We are also brought up in poetry in English, not only in the Irish tradition--studied Yeats when we were at school--but in the English tradition. Very early on I studied the metaphysical poets. When we where 16 or 17, one of our set texts was the metaphysical poets, an edition by Helen Gardner; of John Donne, George Herbert--and all the boys. They were predominantly boys, alas.

I am sure there was few ladies also, but I’m not sure, they seemed to have disappeared somewhat, alas. And perhaps some of them have been rediscovered more recently.

But anyway those where the poets who, as it happened, where very significant to me, John Donne in particular. And then T.S. Eliot, John Donne’s great disciple and champion in the early 20th century--I knew everything there was to be known about TS Eliot when I was 16 or 17. I was into T.S. Eliot the way a healthy creature would be into baseball or something. And the way that a healthy-ish young person would know all the scores and the teams and who did what and who played what in 1923, and all the rest of it, I knew everything there was to be known about T.S. Eliot.

I had a deal with the local librarian, and she got me everything that could be got on T.S. And so I wrote very much in the style of T.S. Eliot, when I started out.

And then, oh, also a great era, the 1960s, for poets, for poetry in translation, poetry and translation. There was a series called the Penguin Poets in Translation, so we were reading for example, Evtushenko. Evtushenko was as well known to us as Yeats--he really was.

So there was that sense of a world literature. I studied French poetry also as a student. I knew a lot about French poetry; a whole range of stuff.

And then I made a study under the guidance of the teacher of 20th century poetry in English. I knew things that I have no idea. I couldn’t tell you what I was doing this morning--but in those days I just knew an awful lot, in the way that kids do, in the way the kids do, and the way that teenagers do, if they’re interested in something.

It just happened to be the thing I was interested in. It could have been something else, but that’s what it was. And then I just plugged away at it and plugged the way and plugged away and plugged away. Yeats has a great line about that. He says “a man, or a woman, dabbles in verses and they become his life.” And that’s basically what has happened to me and, I’m sure, most other poets.

Read the full transcript at