Muldoon, Paul, 1951–, Irish poet, b. Co. Armagh, Northern Ireland, B.A. Queen's Univ., Belfast, 1973. Muldoon worked as an arts producer for the BBC (1973–86), then taught at the Univ. of East Anglia and at Caius College and Fitswilliam College, Cambridge, before immigrating to the United States (1987). He taught creative writing at Princeton and was honorary professor of poetry at Oxford (1999–2004), then became poetry editor at The New Yorker magazine (2007–). Muldoon's allusive and satirical writing contains many riddles and enigmas, and he borrows from numerous poetic styles and traditions, including haiku, sonnet, ballad, and folk song. Among his poetry collections are Madoc: A Mystery (1990), a seminarrative group of related lyrics that is often considered his most dense and complex work, and Moy Sand and Gravel (2002, Pulitzer Prize). He also has written opera librettos, including Vera of Las Vegas (2001) by the composer Daron Hagen, and poetry criticism, including the lectures in The End of the Poem (2006).
See his selected poems (2016) and Poems 1968–1998 (2001).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: English Literature, 20th cent. to the Present: Biographies
