Life & Wisdom Quote by Paul Muldoon

Muldoon’s little act of demystification is also a quiet flex. By insisting that repetition and rhyme aren’t “artificial” add-ons, he’s pushing back against the modern reflex to treat formal pattern as decorative, even suspect: the poetic equivalent of wearing a tie to prove you’re serious. His claim is sharper than it first looks. He’s not saying craft doesn’t matter; he’s arguing that craft is already inside speech, inside memory, inside the way meaning sticks.

The subtext is cultural as much as aesthetic. Late-20th-century poetry in English often split along a familiar fault line: “authentic” free verse versus “contrived” meter and rhyme. Muldoon, an Irish poet with a virtuoso ear, refuses the binary. In Irish and British oral traditions, the music of language isn’t ornament; it’s a storage system. Repetition is how stories survive migration, colonization, and the everyday erosion of attention. Rhyme is how a line insists on being remembered, how it lays a trap for the mind and then snaps shut.

Notice his careful phrasing: “devices like” nods to technique, while “not imposed” relocates authority from the poet’s ego to the language itself. It’s a subtle argument for humility: the poet isn’t forcing patterns onto words so much as uncovering the patterns words already want. That’s also a defense of pleasure. Muldoon treats sonic pattern not as regression to old rules but as evidence that language has its own instincts - and that poems, at their best, follow those instincts to where thought gets sharper, stranger, and harder to forget.