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.

In the following essay, Wills provides an overview of Muldoon's poetic style, his personal and intellectual perspective, and critical approaches to his work.

In the following essay, Kendall provides an overview of Muldoon's family background, education, publishing career, and critical reception, drawing attention to the formative experiences and personal relationships that shaped the development of his poetry.

In the following essay, Wilson discusses Muldoon's break from the Yeatsian tradition of Irish poetry, particularly as evidenced in Muldoon's patterns of sexual signification and linguistic dichotomies that reflect the poet's effort to come to terms with his sense of paternal loss and the deconstructed culture of the postmodern world.

In the following interview, originally conducted on April 4, 1996, Muldoon comments on his national identity and influences, his approach to writing, and the composition of “The Briefcase,” “Madoc,” and “Yarrow.”

In the following review of Hay, Kirsch contends that Muldoon's inventive verse is too often a facile display of technical and stylistic virtuosity, whereby complexity and difficulty serve to “impress,” rather than “convince,” the reader.

In the following review, Driver discusses the modern tradition of libretto collaborations and offers a favorable assessment of Muldoon's verse in Shining Brow.

In the following review, Norfolk compliments The Annals of Chile, drawing attention to the poem “Yarrow” as an example of Muldoon's complex and ambitious verse.

In the following review, Wheatley lauds To Ireland, I, Bandanna, and Muldoon's translation of Aristophanes's The Birds.

In the following excerpt, Vendler compliments both Selected Poems: 1968-1986 and The Annals of Chile, though she expresses reservations over Muldoon's tendency toward emotional detachment and cryptic allusions.

In the following excerpt, Kitchen praises Muldoon's verse in Hay, though finds the collection inferior to his previous volume, The Annals of Chile.

In the following excerpt, Bedient lauds Muldoon's rejection of the traditional motifs of Irish poetry in Meeting the British and Selected Poems: 1968-1986.

In the following essay, Birkerts offers an admiring commentary on Muldoon's challenging and idiosyncratic poetic style.

In the following positive review, Ford asserts that The Annals of Chile is “Muldoon's most open and lyrical collection yet.”

In the following essay, Wheeler presents an overview of Muldoon's poetry, literary career, and personal history, along with Muldoon's own comments on these subjects.

Two years after publication, Paul Muldoon's New Weather remains the most important first book by an Irish poet since Seamus Heaney's Death of a Naturalist appeared in 1966. With this single volume of 36 poems, Muldoon clearly distinguished himself as a major presence in Ireland—not only among the select half-dozen poets in their 20's whose work has managed to outlive its traditionally terminal form of entry (the chapbook series), but also among the Dolmen "professionals,&#...

In the following review, Howard evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Selected Poems: 1968-1987.

In the following review, Burt lauds Muldoon's skillful verb usage and accomplished verse in Kerry Slides.

In the following review, McNamara lauds the symbiotic relationship between Muldoon's two collections The Annals of Chile and The Prince of the Quotidian.

In the following review of To Ireland, I, Wills commends Muldoon's idiosyncratic insight into Irish literary and cultural history, but finds shortcomings in his tendency toward overly esoteric and whimsical interpretations.

In the following review, Korn asserts that there is “much to praise” in The Faber Book of Beasts, calling the work a “subtle and provoking collection.”

In the following positive review, Jones argues that Madoc: A Mystery is “the most ambitious and successful long poem that we've seen in a long time.”

[Mules] will frustrate those wishing Northern Irish poets to lacerate their souls on the bloody realities of Ulster, for in the collection's first poem, "Lunch with Pancho Villa," Muldoon lets a "celebrated pamphleteer" berate the poet-narrator:          'Look, son. Just look around you.         People are getting themselves killed<...

In the following excerpt, Lucas compliments Muldoon's poetic techinques in Meeting the British, calling the collection “the best of his five full volumes of poetry.”

In the following excerpt, Logan recommends Hay as an antidote to hackneyed contemporary poetry, despite Muldoon's frequent outpourings of gratuitous wit and absurdity.

In the following excerpt, Reeve offers a favorable review of The Prince of the Quotidian and The Annals of Chile.

In the following review of Poems 1968-1998, Newey contends that Muldoon's “ludic” poetry often lacks “any substantial core” and risks falling into self-parody.

In the following review, Roberts offers a positive assessment of The Annals of Chile, noting Muldoon's “sharp observation.”

[The essay from which this excerpt is taken was originally broadcast over Radio Telefis Eireann in 1978.] Paul Muldoon's first book was aptly titled New Weather: it introduced us to a distinctive sensibility, a supple inward music, a poetry that insisted on its proper life as words before it conceded the claims of that other life we all live before and after words. Mules continues and develops this hermetic direction and is a strange, rich second collection, reminding one sometimes of the sophisticat...

In the following excerpt, Disch offers a negative assessment of Hay.

Fiction nowadays can scarcely afford to be unselfconscious, and Irish fiction has often been particularly canny about its own business, the artificiality as well as the serious compulsiveness of telling stories. Paul Muldoon opened his second book Mules three years ago with a poem which both established and then exploded a fiction, a process by which he could ask "where do I stand?" in relation to things "made up as I went along." Behind this merely theoretical question lie issue...

In the following review, McCarthy discusses Muldoon's decision to write a new poem for every day in 1992 and praises the subsequent collection of the works in The Prince of the Quotidian.

Faber published New Weather in 1973, when Muldoon was barely 21 years old, and his self-assured technical virtuosity was already startling. Yet for all the wit of the opening stanzas' self-effacing apology, the poem's claims were both grandiose and to some degree contradictory. I have, he announced in "Wind and Trees," a consciousness that is willy-nilly universal, but at the same time a special sort of vision that lets me see—and see through—metaphors. I reject vio...

In the following review, Quinlan argues that The Prince of the Quotidian will likely satisfy only admirers of Muldoon's previous works and those fond of postmodern verse.

Why Brownlee Left is Paul Muldoon's third book, and like its predecessors is written in a style which aspires to the condition of clear glass. There are no outbursts of recherché language, and no strong rhetorical gestures. Just plain phrases and conversational cadences. The result is to make his poetry look simple—child-like, even, at times. Children themselves make a significantly large number of appearances in his work, but even when not actually present, their wide-eyed straightforw...

In his first book, New Weather (1973), [Paul Muldoon] distinguishes himself, through his use of metaphor, from Seamus Heaney, whose disciple he is often proclaimed. In contrast to Heaney's elemental analogies, Muldoon's metaphysical metaphors fleetingly reflect correspondences that grow in one's mind into truths or tease one out of thought. Whereas he offers these correspondences ironically or non-committally, they often suggest an innocent pre-Newtonian view of an interrelated universe...

Paul Muldoon's third collection [Why Brownlee Left] is as humane, ingenious and formally skilful as one would expect after New Weather and Mules, and just a mite disappointing. The poems here show (and sometimes show off) his quirky, offbeat talent for sudden revelatory flights from mundane contexts. At the close of 'Whim' the man, making love to a woman in the Botanic Gardens, gets literally stuck into her…. Here again are many examples of childhood recollection and the anecdota...

Muldoon's Quoof begins and ends … with an epigraph from Rasmussen's The Netsilik Eskimos—telling how a female shaman made herself a penis of willow, a sledge out of her genitals and a dog from shit-stained snow—and a long last poem 'loosely based', according to the blurb, 'on the Trickster cycle of the Winnebago Indians'…. Muldoon relishes [the] inventive unpredictability [of Amerindian myths]. His dazzling long poem, 'The more a m...

The obscurity in Paul Muldoon's work is … evasive, and often downright teasing. He's a sophisticated high-gloss technician, managing rhyme and stanza forms with dazzling accomplishment, but the greater the verbal clarity in his poems the more puzzling they seem to become…. Quoof (the family name for a hot-water bottle), is prefaced by an account of an Eskimo shaman, and begins and ends with poems which make reference to psilocybin. This sets the tone and the scene. Throughout the...

In the following review, Quinlan offers a positive assessment of Selected Poems: 1968-1986.

In the following review, the critic commends Muldoon's “suburban observation and whimsical memory” in Moy Sand and Gravel.

[Paul Muldoon] represents a painfully accurate rendezvous for the exacting requirements of traditional skill, youthful experiment and popular demand. But the poems [in New Weather], though sometimes competition winners, are rather iced with their own talent…. [He has] a punchy inventiveness, a dry, flourished mascularity, which, with low Irish cunning, cleverly disguises and brings up to date for city consumption their essential literariness. Muldoon's detached virtuosity sits uneasily on the ...

[Paul Muldoon has written] elegantly turned out pastorals in Mules. Here, every cowpat is carefully placed just where you have to notice it for authenticity's sake, yet it is never in the way of a smooth effect. In an eerily subtle study of homosexuality (or so I assume) at his school, Muldoon's snaffled, laconic casualness leads to crude action…. (p. 486) If this poem—called 'How to Play Championship Tennis'—for reasons of subject-matter and tone sounds a bi...

[In Mules Paul Muldoon] is evidently aware that however far he reaches, home is where he starts from, and home rules…. Muldoon turns a cold eye on a land fit for anti-heroes. Here are poems of the revolutionary, the centaur, vacquero, Virgin, stripper, Bearded Woman, merman: a cavalcade of the great reduced by a quiet faith and suburban constrictions into fit subjects for poems of containment. His language is crisp and refreshingly tart, finely expressing the often difficult relations between his par...

In his first book New Weather Paul Muldoon seemed to be controlling a native Irish airiness with a certain determination to be modern and realistic, but he also showed a reluctance to engage with much of the recalcitrantly unliterary stuff of modern life (so that when he mentioned 'the water that slopped / From the system he was meant / To have lagged' one could wonder momentarily if this was some unusually arcane bit of allegory). In his new book Mules there isn't much blunt banality e...