Life & Wisdom Quote by Paul Muldoon

A quiet scolding wrapped in a shrug: “We simply have not kept in touch with poetry” lands like a diagnosis delivered in plain clothes. Muldoon’s “we” is doing double duty. It’s communal (a culture that’s drifted), but it’s also a crafty dodge of moralizing; he indicts without posturing, letting the understatement carry the heat. “Simply” is the knife. It suggests the problem isn’t poetry’s difficulty or irrelevance, but neglect - an unreturned call, a relationship allowed to go stale.

The phrasing “kept in touch” is deliberately domestic and contemporary. Poetry isn’t framed as a lofty art form to be decoded; it’s a living correspondent, something you maintain through small, regular acts of attention. That metaphor smuggles in Muldoon’s larger aesthetic argument: poems aren’t monuments, they’re conversations - full of mishearing, surprise, and intimacy. If you stop listening, you lose the ear for compressed meaning, for tonal nuance, for the kinds of ambiguities that don’t resolve into slogans.

Contextually, it reads as a response to late-20th- and early-21st-century cultural conditions: information glut, speed, instrumental thinking, education systems that train for utility. Muldoon, a poet famed for linguistic agility and formal play, isn’t pleading for poetry as “medicine.” He’s pointing at a civic and psychological atrophy: when a society lets its poetic literacy lapse, it also lets its capacity for complex feeling and complex truth lapse. The line works because it’s less a lament than a reminder that reconnection is possible - and, implied, overdue.