Paul Muldoon

Muldoon performed at our February 2026 Seriously Entertaining show, “It’s Not Me, It’s You.”

Paul Muldoon is one of the most influential poets of the past half century, known for work that is at once intellectually restless, formally inventive, and startlingly funny. His recent collection, Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, is charged with the same electric energy that has defined his work for decades— unfurling ancient maps, personal bric-a-brac, and the long shadow of empire into poems that are a joy to experience. Muldoon is the author of fifteen full-length collections, including Moy Sand and Gravel—which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Griffin Poetry Prize. His poems have been translated into twenty languages. Muldoon taught at Princeton University for nearly four decades, and from 2022 to 2025 served as the official Ireland Professor of Poetry. Previously, he also served as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University and as the poetry editor of The New Yorker. Muldoon’s honors include the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and the Seamus Heaney Award for Arts & Letters.