Politics & Power Quote by Paul Muldoon

Muldoon’s “obviously” is doing more work than it pretends to. It’s a casual throat-clear that doubles as a pressure valve: in Northern Ireland, especially across the years of the Troubles, the political wasn’t a backdrop so much as the weather system you lived inside. By framing the task as something poets “had to try” to do, he sidesteps the heroic myth of the poet as seer and replaces it with a more accurate role: a citizen with a hypersensitive instrument, compelled to translate chaos into something legible.

The phrase “make sense” is the key. It doesn’t promise moral clarity or tidy lessons; it suggests triage. Day-to-day politics in that context meant shifting narratives, coded language, sudden violence, propaganda, and the exhausting demand to take a side in public even when private experience didn’t fit the slogans. Muldoon’s subtext is that poetry becomes a rival form of journalism and counter-jurisprudence: not reporting events, but auditing the meanings people try to staple onto events.

His inclusion of “and beyond” matters, too. It refuses to quarantine Northern Irish writing as a local curiosity or a trauma genre. The implication is that poets elsewhere were also contending with politics as lived experience, but Northern Ireland forced the issue into the foreground, making neutrality feel like a pose. The line quietly defends difficulty and indirection in poetry: if politics is incoherent up close, then a poem that sounds fragmented, slippery, or darkly playful may be less an aesthetic choice than an honest record of the times.