Time & Perspective Quote by Paul Muldoon

“Despite all that” is doing the heavy lifting here. Muldoon doesn’t bother itemizing the “that” because he’s trusting you to supply it: the suspicion that poetry is elitist, irrelevant, too hard, too precious; the fact that most people don’t read it day-to-day; the way culture’s attention economy treats poems like antique furniture. He concedes the familiar charges with a shrug, then flips the frame. The “other side” isn’t a rebuttal so much as a quiet empirical claim: poetry survives not by winning the weekly popularity contest, but by showing up when the stakes spike.

The verb choice matters. People don’t “consume” poetry; they “reach out” to it. That’s the language of need, not taste, an almost physical gesture across distance. Muldoon is hinting at poetry’s peculiar job in modern life: it’s not always a pastime, it’s an instrument. Weddings, funerals, heartbreaks, political shocks, births, diagnoses - moments when ordinary speech starts sounding like cardboard and the self wants words that can bear pressure. Poetry, with its compression and patterning, doesn’t just describe feeling; it formalizes it, makes it shareable without flattening it.

There’s a sly defense embedded in the line: poetry’s value can’t be measured by casual readership alone. It’s a genre people keep in reserve, like a flare. Muldoon’s intent is both modest and pointed - poetry’s relevance is intermittent, but at the exact moments that define a life.