SOURCE: Muldoon, Paul, and Lynn Keller. “An Interview with Paul Muldoon.” Contemporary Literature 35, no. 1 (spring 1994): 1-29.

In the following interview, originally conducted between April 22 and 23, 1993, Muldoon discusses the creative origins and artistic aims of Shining Brow and Madoc: A Mystery, his incorporation of historical and literary references in these works, and his views on contemporary poetry and the formal aspects of his own verse.

Born in 1951, the poet Paul Muldoon was raised in a Catholic household in county Armagh in Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland. His father was a market gardener, his mother a schoolteacher; as the offspring of this “mixed marriage” (the title of an early poem), Muldoon in his writing seems drawn on the one hand to the reassuring—if currently threatened—solidities of nature or of rural life and on the other to esoteric scholarly learning and flights of verbal fancy. His work is often autobiographical, yet...