Paul Muldoon Quotes

I wanted to reimagine the role, in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents, events, preoccupations; and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry.

Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.

Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

So few people read poetry. That's sad, isn't it?

To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.

That's another pompous expression that is out of fashion, to say that poetry is a gift. It sounds pompous because you say, 'Who gave you the gift, and what is this gift?' And the gift is where I am; the gift is what I have come out of, the people around me who, I think, are beautiful people.

It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one.

When poets go off the boil, they sound like bumble bees; when critics do, they sound like sewing machines.

The works of great poets have never been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.

Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.

When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.

My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.

The nations that are achieving something have no taste for poetry

The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.

I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

For some odd reason, the expression 'death of a poet' always sounds somewhat more concrete than 'life of a poet.'

So the best way to understand poetry, which is made by men, is to imitate, and that goes back to making work as a kind of doorway into new work, as opposed to making work as a mirror of the old work.

Mostly, when I travel, I want to represent my own work well and let others know how I feel about poetry being an important part of life.

The poetry of India can be truly known only through scanning the poetry of all languages.

What is the point of narrating poetry when the listener can't appreciate and enjoy the meaning?