[In Ireland] most writers have become wearied by the attritional quality of their relationship to their society and its history. Given the example of W. B. Yeats, the political and economic depression, the society's fixed loyalties and fissile emotions, it was difficult for an Irish poet of the thirties and forties to see his function as anything less than redemptive. It was as though every poet was compelled by circumstances to see himself as a major poet if he was to become a poet at all. This stress on creativity had to be damaging. Much Irish poetry after Yeats would have been more memorable if it could have settled for being less ambitious. (pp. 199-200)

Thomas Kinsella inherited the disappointments of that era and subsumed them in his early work into a long contemplative exercise on the problem of evil. The climax to this phase of his work...