Life & Wisdom Quote by Paul Muldoon

Muldoon frames poetry less as a genteel art than as a kind of altitude sickness you willingly court. “That pitch” and “that edge” don’t just signal intensity; they imply a sustained, precarious state where perception sharpens and ordinary language starts to feel inadequate. The phrasing is quietly diagnostic: poets “engage in” this condition, as if it’s a practice, an exercise, even a risk-managed flirtation with danger. Not every poet lives there full-time, he concedes, but the job description includes periodic exposure.

The subtext is a rebuttal to the comforting idea of inspiration as a warm glow. Muldoon suggests the real engine is extremity: emotional, intellectual, formal. “Edge” hints at psychic vulnerability, but also at stylistic brinkmanship - the point where a line break can change the moral temperature of a sentence, where a metaphor might save you or betray you. And “pitch” carries a double charge: musical exactitude and the act of throwing yourself forward. Poetry becomes both tuning and leap.

Context matters here because Muldoon’s own work is famous for virtuosic swerves - rhyme that feels like mischief, references that ricochet from pop culture to politics, tonal shifts that refuse to behave. He’s talking about a discipline of staying alert to instability: the world’s, the self’s, the poem’s. The line lands as a modest confession and a provocation. If you want the beauty, he implies, you accept the vertigo.