Reading the ground: the poetry of Thomas Kinsella

Thomas Kinsella began writing in the early 1950s when Irish poets were struggling to emerge from what he identified as the double shadow of Yeats and English verse. Throughout his career, Kinsella has sought to establish his identity as an Irish poet writing in English, and to determine his place within the dual Irish tradition, Gaelic and English. This comprehensive study explores the poet's development within both the Irish and the English contexts, and defines the nature of his poetic achievement. It also offers a new reading of Kinsella's evolving relationship to one of his major literary forebears, W.B. Yeats. What becomes clear is the formidable accomplishment of a poet, now writing at the height of his powers, whose substantial body of work warrants comparison with the grand masters of 20th-century literature in English, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett. Beginning with Kinsella's first volume of poetry in 1956 and concluding with his most recent work, From Centre City (1994), the book traces the evolution of the poet's style and vision from the formal lyricism of his early volumes, through the long narrative poems of his middle period, to his later sequences of spare, laconic poems that are increasingly rich in polyphony and intertextuality. It finds that the formal structure and mellifluous cadence of Kinsella's early poetry, indebted to the works of past masters, such as Auden, Eliot and Yeats, give way to experimentalism, to a dislocated poetry that is often lacking closure. In his later writing, diverse exemplars, ranging from the early Irish literature and myth and the 18th-century Irish poet Aogan O Rathaille to the psycholoanalysis of Carl Jung and the music of Gustav Mahler and Sean O Riada, aid Kinsella in tracing his personal and poetic inheritance. This book illuminates poetry often regarded as difficult, and offers a useful evaluation of a major poet who continues to contribute to contemporary Irish poetry.