Paul Muldoon is generally associated with Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and James Simmons. These poets, who emerged in Northern Ireland over a short span of time and achieved, in varying degrees, international recognition, constitute an outbreak of rich and varied talent from one small area such as has not been seen in Ireland since Yeats and the Celtic Renaissance.

Of this group, Muldoon is the youngest and perhaps the most discernibly individual. Edna Longley, an Irish critic, calls him "the most conspicuously sui generis of contemporary Ulster poets." Derek Mahon has said that, unlike the other poets with whom he is associated, Muldoon has seemed to go in two directions at once: back to the Irish mythological roots with the others and forward to metaphysical worlds of his own devising. These two worlds come together in his poetry and, as they are intertwined, seem not divergent...