Poetry legend – Paul Muldoon

Seamus Heaney still remembers that day in 1968 when the shy 16-year-old stood before him, a small, cherubic boy from a modest family, with a wash of wild, curly hair framing his face. The boy, Paul Muldoon, had just been introduced to Mr. Heaney, the poet, by his high school English teacher at a reading in Armagh in Northern Ireland. Mr. Muldoon asked if he could send Mr. Heaney his poems. He said yes, and in the mail they came.

There was one about a lamb: „You were first./The ewe licked clean ochre and lake/But you would not move./Weighted with stones yet/Dead your dead head floats./Better dead than sheep.“

„Perhaps you can tell me where I went wrong?“ the boy asked in a note.

Mr. Heaney wrote back. „I don’t think I can help you,“ he remembered saying recently. „You’ll find out everything you need to know.“

„The genius was there already,“ Mr. Heaney said. / NYT *) 19.11.02