Life & Wisdom Quote by Paul Muldoon

Muldoon is poking at the poet's oldest hustle: riding collective feeling while pretending you invented the wave. "Ground swell" is a sly choice because it already carries two registers at once - the oceanic lift that keeps you afloat and the mass movement that can suddenly turn into undertow. In one image he frames the artist's relationship to public mood as a bargain with physics: the same force that elevates you is the one that will drown you if you misread it or overtrust it.

Then he does the more Muldoon-ish thing: he undercuts his own metaphor in real time. "These are cliches also" isn't an apology; it's a stage direction. He's reminding you that language arrives pre-worn, packed with hand-me-down meanings, and that poetry isn't purity so much as pressure-testing. The line "I'm sometimes interested in how much one can get away with" turns the whole exchange into a connoisseur's flirtation with fraud: how far can you push stock phrases before they become newly charged, before the reader notices the seams?

Context matters: Muldoon's work is famous for its verbal agility, its willingness to rhyme against expectation, to let puns and inherited forms do double duty as music and critique. Coming out of late-20th-century skepticism about grand statements (and out of an Irish tradition acutely aware of rhetoric's costs), he's less interested in sincere confession than in the ethics of technique. The subtext: cliche isn't the enemy; unexamined cliche is. The poet's job is to surf the obvious, then show you the riptide underneath.