80 Quotes by Paul Muldoon

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

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.

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

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

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

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

That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were

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

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry