SOURCE: “‘The Enabling Ritual’: Irish Poetry in the 'Seventies,” in Shenandoah, Vol. XXV, No. 4, Summer, 1974, pp. 3-24.

In the following essay, Johnston compares works by Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Richard Murphy, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Seamus Deane, Richard Ryan, and Paul Muldoon.

But the stupidity Of root, shoot, blossom or clay Make no demand. I bend my body to the spade Or grope with a dirty hand.                                                                                 W. B. Yeats Our pioneers keep striking Inwards and downwards.                                                                                 Seamus Heaney 

After Austin Clarke's death, on March 19th of this year, his body was cremated.¹ Knowing that the church was unlikely to grant him permission to be buried in Irish soil, this unrecanting heresiarch willed that his body be flown to Belfast where cremation is permitted. It seems likely that from his ashes will arise the second, fuller stage of the Irish poetic revival.

Clarke, who like the aging Yeats...