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Hailed as the most important poet of his generation, renowned Irish poet Paul Muldoon is an extremely adept reader and writer. Ergodicity is the degree that a reader takes a disrupted path through a text. This study uses Muldoon's work as a poet and as a critic as a datum edge from which the ideas of difficulty, ergodicity, and allusion can be measured, significantly expanding the applications of ergodicity as it has previously been defined. Paul Muldoon has published over thirty collections and won many prizes including a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize. He held the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999 to 2004. At Princeton University he is both the Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor in the Humanities and chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. He is also the president of the Poetry Society in the UK and Poetry Editor of the New Yorker.