A Quote by Paul Muldoon

I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on.

Paul Muldoon

Quote Topics

Century French French Poetry Irish Lot Ninth Poetry Read

Quote Author

Paul Muldoon
English - Poet
Born: June 20, 1951

There was engrained poetry and then when you look back at our history and in the 20th century, the last century, probably the greatest writers of the 20th century were Irish. It became our only weapon, was our poetry, our music.

Gavin Friday

Given that the nineteenth century was the century of Socialism, of Liberalism, and of Democracy, it does not necessarily follow that the twentieth century must also be a century of Socialism, Liberalism and Democracy: political doctrines pass, but humanity remains, and it may rather be expected that this will be a century of authority ... a century of Fascism. For if the nineteenth century was a century of individualism it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism and hence the century of the State.

Benito Mussolini

My biggest poetic influences are probably 20th-century British and Irish poets. So I suppose I'm always listening for the music I associate with that poetry, the telling images, the brevity. I want to hear it in my own work as well as in the poetry I read. However, I think I'm generally more forgiving of other poets than myself.

David Starkey

The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth century ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.

Eric Hoffer

Most of what I read is for reviewing purposes or related to something I want to write about. It's slightly utilitarian. I definitely miss that sense of being a disinterested reader who's reading purely for the pleasure of imagining his way into emotional situations and vividly realized scenes in nineteenth-century France or late nineteenth-century Russia.

Pankaj Mishra

I read a lot of poetry. All types of poetry, but mostly Catalan poetry, because I believe poetry is the essence of language. Reading the classics, be they medieval or contemporary, gives me a stylistic energy that I'm very interested in.

Jaume Cabre

The United States' poetry emerged when there was a high literacy rate in the United States, even in the 19th century. People read the poetry when it was written. In Ireland, there was a poor literacy rate and people remember that poetry. That was handed on as a memorial tradition.

Eavan Boland

I'll say that this is probably the best time for poetry since the T'ang dynasty. All the rest of the world is going to school on American poetry in the twentieth century, from Ezra Pound to W. S. Merwin, and for very good reason. We have soaked up influence in the last century like a sponge. It's cross-pollination, first law of biology, that the more variety you have the more health you have.

Sam Hamill

You only had widespread literacy and books that people could afford in the middle of the 19th century. Did more people read poetry at the turn of the 20th century when there were about fifty million people?

Robert Hass

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

David Hare

Let's be honest - Bill Murray was onto something when he laughed at Andie MacDowell's degree in 19th century French poetry in 'Groundhog Day'.

Marco Rubio

I'm not a twentieth-century novelist, I'm not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was the century that produced the models of the form. I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst, and I'm not an intellectual.

John Irving

These 21st-century 'teavangelicals,' who represent a considerable segment of the Republican party, are vastly different from their 19th-century forebears. Nineteenth-century evangelicals were concerned with societal ills such as temperance, slavery, the rise of industrialisation and suffrage.

Anthea Butler

Before the 20th century, the ulcer was not a respectable disease. Doctors would say, 'You're under a lot of stress.' Nineteenth-century Europe and America had all these crazy health spas and quack treatments.

Barry Marshall

I've had the good fortune to read a lot of great American writers in translation, and my absolute beloved, for me one of the greatest writers ever, is Mark Twain. Yes, yes, yes. And Whitman, from whom the whole of 20th-century poetry sprung up. Whitman was the origin of things, someone with a completely different outlook. But I think that he's the father of the new wave in the world's poetry which to this very day is hitting the shore.