Life & Wisdom Quote by Paul Muldoon

Muldoon turns self-deprecation into a kind of perverse hospitality: he does not merely endure being “put down,” he “actively welcome[s]” it, as if criticism were a familiar guest. That verb choice matters. “Welcome” implies agency and ritual, suggesting a learned posture rather than a spontaneous quirk. The line performs what it describes: a measured confession that keeps sentiment at arm’s length, delivered in the cool, qualifying logic of “I suppose” and “for whatever reason.” Those hedges are doing protective work, letting him expose a wound without surrendering control of the narrative.

The subtext is less masochism than conditioning. He traces the reflex back to “upbringing,” then sharpens it into a specific charge: “not being worthy.” That phrasing borrows the language of moral judgment and social gatekeeping. It’s not “not good enough” in a casual sense; it’s an “accusation” that can be “laid at one’s door,” like a formal complaint served by a community, a family, a school, a church. The passivity of that image - the charge arrives, you receive it - hints at an early environment where approval was contingent and shame was administrative.

For a poet, this is also an origin story for craft. If you grow up under a standing indictment, you learn to preempt the prosecution: get there first, turn the criticism into material, convert vulnerability into style. Muldoon’s candor reads as both self-knowledge and strategy, acknowledging how the artist’s sensitivity is often forged in the same furnace as the artist’s defensiveness.