Interviewing Tom Paulin is an intimidating prospect. Would my questions meet with the famous explosions of disgust associated with his appearances as a panellist on the BBC’s Newsnight Review? Maybe, instead, he would merely ridicule them in those languid Ulster tones? In short, would he be the same off-screen as he is on it?

The muddy waters of the Isis slope past the end of Paulin’s quiet Oxford street. His house is Victorian, with a bay window, neatly paved front garden, trim bushes and shiny front door. Paulin, shoeless and amiable, leads me inside through an elegant interior of well-matched furniture and rugs. He says Giti, his wife of 35 years, chooses the furniture. In the drawing room, he seats me by the fire and he sits on a chaise longue, one arm over his crossed legs, the other stretched out on the seat.

Newsnight Review is a sideline to Paulin’s career as an academic, literary critic and poet. The GM Young lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford, since 1994, the 58-year-old has, as part of an extraordinary generation of Northern Irish poets that includes Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon, written eight collections of poetry from A State of Justice (1977, winner of the Eric Gregory Award) to The Road to Inver (2004, shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize). This in addition to editing five anthologies of poetry and prose; putting his own poetic spin on translations of Sophocles and Aeschylus plays; being a director of Brian Friel and Stephen Rea’s cross-sectarian Field Day Theatre Company in Derry; and writing six volumes of literary criticism.

This month sees the publication of an engaging seventh. The Secret Life of Poems analyses 45 poems by 45 writers, from Shakespeare to Larkin, and Donne to Muldoon. Metre is examined, images illuminated, surprising interpretations offered. Paulin argues, for example, that Keats’s “Ode to Autumn” is codedly political, with redcoat soldiers and the Peterloo Massacre lurking behind the poem’s poppies and harvests.

How did he choose the poems in the book? “They were ones I was interested in and thought I had something to say about, like ‘Ode to Autumn’, where I tried to put a different position.

“I wanted to write a book which would be about the DNA structure of poetry. The way poets talk about poetry in terms of rhythm and metre and cadence ... I think in terms of images or rhythms and I had the idea of writing what I hoped would be a kind of handbook [on poetry].”

His own poetry was initially haunted by Ireland’s Troubles: “the hill quarries / Echoing blasts over the secured city; / Or, in a private house, a Judge / Shot in the hallway before his daughter / By a boy who shut his eyes as his hand tightened” (“Under The Eyes”). Conflict also dominates the much later The Invasion Handbook (2002), the first volume of a planned poetic trilogy on the second world war.

Does conflict particularly attract him as a subject?

“I haven’t thought about it consciously. Paul Klee [the artist] when he was in the German army, was in charge of a petrol dump on an aerodrome. When one of their planes crashed, he’d cut the canvas off the fuselage and do a painting on it. And I suppose that’s what we [the Northern Irish poets] were doing.”

Paulin says he realises that his own later, free verse poems can be hard, but rewarding, work. “I wish I could write lyrical poems but I just write the way they come. You do what you can. You go through periods when you don’t write. I haven’t written a poem for about a year and a half. You just have to hope something will turn up.”

This Paulin, self-critical, uncertain, is a long way from Newsnight Review’s Mr Angry. Since his first appearance on the TV arts programme’s forerunner, Late Review, in 1994, Paulin has wielded the critical machete without fear of older establishment figures (“He should never have been allowed near a paintbrush, absolutely awful,” was his view on David Hockney’s paintings) or current ones (“I am not interested in the bits and pieces that make up this man’s attempt at imagination,” was his take on Turner Prize-winner Douglas Gordon).

As a critic, what makes Paulin so entertaining is his unpredictability. So it is that the revered Mike Leigh play Abigail’s Party is dismissed as “middle-class anxiety mocking the aspirational working class”; the Star Wars films are “an extraordinary epic about the American Republic ... Take the Jedi, they represent the American Constitution”; and the comedy Auf Wiedersehen, Pet is “a work of genius .. national folklore being created in front of your eyes”.

What attracted him to television? “I thought it would be fun. You meet lots of bright young people, you see all sorts of things you wouldn’t have seen. You find yourself alone practically in a Manet exhibition or a Jackson Pollock exhibition.” Panellists do not exchange views beforehand. “You just don’t know where people are going to come from. You just don’t know what will happen,” he says.

I mention the cultish attention he attracts, such as the Blackburn band called Tompaulin and the puppet-critic Tom Tortoise on The Adam and Joe Show. “I don’t think about it. I just do the programme, yeah. It would be bad if you took yourself seriously.”

I ask him about his own secret life, outside television and work. “All I do is read books, really. I worry about that sometimes. I don’t seem to have a hobby or anything.” He does get out a bit, he concedes. “I work in the Bodleian a lot and I often meet friends there and go off for coffee and lunch.”

Well, how about family life, why doesn’t it appear in his poems? (Paulin’s wife is from Strabane, a member of Northern Ireland’s small Sikh community. They met as students at Hull University and have two sons Michael, 27, and Niall, 26.)

“I’ve not been able to manage the lyrical or the domestic much.” In poetry anyway. “I do most of the cooking. I’m kind of domestic, untidily so.”

Paulin smiles often, particularly at himself, but his conversation about almost anything but literature has to be coaxed.

He was born in Leeds in 1949 into a middle class family that moved to Northern Ireland (his mother’s home) when he was four.

What was his childhood like?

“There is a sort of extended family quality to Belfast. It was very stimulating growing up there, especially in the 1960s.”

Home was intellectually lively, he says. “My parents were Northern Ireland Labour party people. We read the Guardian and the New Statesman, listened to the BBC. The house was full of books. We didn’t get a television until That Was The Week That Was started. There was nothing to do but read.”

When did the poetic urge strike? He becomes more animated. “I had a very good English teacher called Eric Brown. He bought in the record which had Robert Frost reading “After Apple Picking”. I had a book called Modern Poets and Poetry, a very dear great aunt gave it to me when I was 16 or 17. I got interested in Frost’s use of the vernacular. He taught you to respect the way people around you spoke.”

I ask about his family.

“Well, my father was the headmaster of Annadale Grammar School and my mother was a doctor.” This is all he says at first. He then adds that he has two brothers and there is another pause.

“One brother is dead. I have one brother,” he says. The other died of cerebral palsy. “We’d go and visit him and you’d feel sad for him because there was real intelligence, just buried very deep. He was my youngest brother. He died in 1974. It was a great sadness.”

In 1967, he left Northern Ireland and returned to the mainland to read English at Hull. “It was a great shock coming to England. I found it very traumatic,” he says.

Why?

“Just being in a different place. Everyone seemed very sophisticated.”

Even in Hull?

“Oh yeah,” he smiles. “Very intimidating. More confident, yeah.”

‘Tom Paulin was my teacher’

Ten years ago I applied to read English at Hertford College, mainly because I’d seen Tom Paulin on TV and thought he’d be a great teacher, writes Catherine Shoard. Quite a few others had had the same thought, it turned out, but Hertford’s energetic welcome of state school pupils and a lucky break with a John Clare poem at interview meant I got in.

And we were right: he is a great teacher. Every week, maybe twice a week, our English set would trot up in twos or threes to his study for a couple of hours to talk Defoe or Milton or Heaney. The first thing that hit you was the smell: a lovely, musty sort of odour, less like old books than old coffee, or that starchy steam you get when you iron a shirt when it’s too damp. In lectures, Tom is focused and serious but in tutorials he seems the mildest of men: pleasingly relaxed about essay punctuality, always encouraging you to go off on tangents on anything he hasn’t heard before. And if it happened to involve Ireland, or Hazlitt, well, all the better.

As with his criticism, he favours close reading in his teaching – I remember writing a whole essay about the use of the word “chevy” in a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. And Tom’s method has other bonuses for the student: perhaps you won’t have to slog through the whole of Clarissa, perhaps you could get by with a few choice chapters. But that’s not why he is popular with us.

Nor was it his fame, though we were pretty excited by it at first – I recall a lot of nudging when he got a call from Germaine Greer mid-tutorial. But he wears it so lightly, like a hat he has left on by accident, that you soon forget. Until, of course, someone outside Oxford asked who your tutor was and was amazed to find they’d heard of them. I remember Tom once gamely signing a book of his poetry for my boyfriend’s slightly smitten mum. Later, that glam reference proved handy with potential employers too.

Unconceited and self-effacing, he handled the endless emotional problems our English set threw at him with good humour. He is approachable and supportive – clapping at an awful play some of us put on in a badminton court and a rather better one staged above a pub. But the big surprise about him is just how gentle, even vulnerable, he seems – not thin-skinned exactly, but someone who feels things keenly. When you’d done a duff essay, or skimped on the reading, you felt genuinely ashamed for letting him down. That was quite something. It’s rare to have a teacher for whom you feel nothing but warmth.

Paulin’s sentences often end with “yeah”, like a tutor’s approving tick. His voice is unhurried, his words considered with a poet’s discrimination, the syllables often stretching at the end of phrases for emphasis.

He was at Hull when Philip Larkin was university librarian. “He was a presence, a forbidding presence,” says Paulin. “I only met him once when I was a student and then I met him a few times subsequently.”

After Hull came a BLit at Lincoln College, Oxford. His poetry was encouraged by fellow student and poet Douglas Dunn but it was after Oxford that his literary career really began. “When I got a job in 1972 in Nottingham [as university lecturer], I started trying to write [poetry] seriously. I used to get up at seven o’clock and write for an hour before breakfast, then go and teach.” He stayed for 22 years, arriving at Oxford in 1994.

Paulin has always provided his family with salaried stability. Still, he thinks slightly less of himself for it. “I always feel freelance writers are leading a heroic life. I think that is the real writer’s life. On the other hand, it’s good to have another job. It gives you something to do.” He smiles. “You meet people. And I love teaching.”

Another Oxford poet-academic, Craig Raine, has a work, “Flying to Belfast”, in The Secret Life of Poems. Did he discuss it with Raine?

“Not at all, not in the least, no. We fell out about my Faber Book of Political Verse in the 1980s. Things were really wrecked by that.” The gist of the disagreement, he says, is that Raine objected to the inclusion of Milton in the book (“he said Milton wasn’t a political poet”).

But Paulin still included Raine’s poem in his new book?

“Oh indeed. Well, I admire the poem very much.”

Politics is never very far away with Paulin. His own are unaligned left. An opponent of the invasion of Iraq, he says: “I belong to the minority that wants a European superstate. I think it would redress the balance a bit, between America and the rest of the world.”

His political views have occasionally caused controversy. On Newsnight Review in January 2002, in a verbal tussle with Germaine Greer he called the Bloody Sunday paratroopers “rotten racist bastards”. In April of that year, in an interview with Egypt’s Al-Ahram newspaper, Paulin said Israel’s Brooklyn-born Jewish settlers “should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists.” Paulin has said his words were distorted and has long attacked anti-Semitism but there was a storm of letters in the press.

I ask him about the controversy. Arms and legs firmly crossed, he says: “Och, that was years ago, I’ve nothing to say about that.”

Is he sure?

“Och it’s so long ago,” he smiles.

What about his Bloody Sunday comments. Were they premeditated?

“No, it just came into my head. I used to be rather intemperate but that’s gone.” And of being part of Britain’s dissenting tradition, he later says: “I think I’ve had all my arguments.”

What caused this change? “I don’t know, I suppose, you know I’m nearly 60, maybe I’ve grown up.” He pauses, adds jovially: “Belatedly. I think it’s a phase you go through. Some longer than others.”

He sounds relieved that this is the case. Indeed, in person Paulin is friendly and thoughtful (even asking if I mind him smoking in his own home), at odds with his image as a controversial, vitriolic critic. It is when he perceives injustice, or empty or mean-minded work, that the lid flies off.

As I leave him, I reflect that it is typical of Paulin that he hasn’t talked to Craig Raine for more than 20 years but that he still includes Raine’s work in The Secret Life of Poems.

‘The Secret Life of Poems’, Faber and Faber, £17.99