Life & Wisdom Quote by Paul Muldoon

Muldoon’s line lands like a shrug with teeth: it deflates the perennial fantasy that meaning can be policed. “Of course” is doing sly work, signaling that the lesson is obvious and yet routinely ignored by critics, institutions, even writers themselves. The verb “legislate” drags in the language of courts and committees, a deliberately heavy metaphor for something as volatile and intimate as reading. It implies authority, enforcement, compliance - and then quietly reveals how absurd that posture looks when aimed at a poem.

The intent isn’t just to celebrate reader freedom in a feel-good way. It’s a defensive maneuver and an aesthetic credo. Muldoon, famous for his puzzles, puns, and genre-hopscotch, writes in a register that invites misreading, overreading, and productive confusion. The subtext: if you’re demanding a single authorized interpretation, you’re asking literature to behave like a statute rather than an experience. A poem can be crafted with ruthless precision, but the reception is built out of stray associations, private histories, political moods, classroom power dynamics, and the reader’s own desire to win the argument.

Contextually, the quote sits comfortably inside late-20th-century anxieties about interpretation: the post-theory hangover where “the death of the author” becomes less a slogan than a practical nuisance. Muldoon is too witty to posture as helpless. He’s acknowledging limits while also exploiting them. You can’t legislate reading - but you can write in ways that tempt, bait, and booby-trap it.