Life & Wisdom Quote by Paul Muldoon

Muldoon sneaks a bracing demotion into what sounds, at first, like a love letter to the art. “One does one’s little turn” borrows the language of vaudeville and variety shows: you step into the light, do your bit, and step back out before anyone mistakes you for the whole program. That choice matters. It drains poetry of priestly aura and replaces it with craft, timing, and humility - a performance tradition where brilliance is real but never permanent.

Then he swerves into agriculture: “part of the great crop.” The metaphor is both consoling and faintly merciless. Crops are abundant, seasonal, and replaceable; they suggest nourishment and continuity, but also the fact that any single stalk is not the harvest. In a literary culture obsessed with signature voices and careerist “importance,” Muldoon’s line deflates the ego without denying achievement. Your poem might be good - even great - but it’s also one more yield in a long, crowded field of language.

The subtext is a quiet ethics of attention. Poetry, for Muldoon, isn’t a ladder to climb but a lineage to join. The “great thing” isn’t immortality; it’s perspective: you write inside a living ecosystem of predecessors, peers, and successors, and that ecosystem outlasts your moment. Coming from a poet famed for virtuosity and verbal high-wire acts, the modesty lands as credibility, not posture: the magician reminding you the trick is older than the magician.