Paul Muldoon Quotes

I like to write poetry.

The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.

In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

I love the feeling of creating pictures in someone's mind just by spelling out the right lyrical combination.

But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.

I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.

But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.

Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.

You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.

I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.

I've written poetry since I was in the first grade, and it wasn't until I was a little bit older that I realized poetry could be put to music and become a song.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man's expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid.

In those days, it didn't take much imagination to come up with something that required great lyric development skills. You just thought of an experience that you might have gone through, and write it down.

I guess I'm drawn to artists and literary people and want to learn about them.

Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don't by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.

After you kind of find your footing, sonnets are what comes easiest.

A lot of people feel that the realm of poetry and the realm of the lyric is personal feeling and should rise above politics, which, in fact, good poetry has never done.

This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.