Thomas Kinsella’s Poetic of Unease

Abstract

Contrary to John Hewitt’s eclectic and hesitant Ulster negotiations with poetry and history, the Dublin poet Thomas Kinsella has for some decades been a purposeful explorer of two seemingly contradictory poetic impulses in the modern world. One impulse demands fidelity to the native yet, because of the nation’s colonization, dual Irish tradition, which includes English and Gaelic writing. The other impulse is concerned to further the aesthetic and technical experiments of international modernist writers like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams.