SOURCE: “Introduction,” in The Whole Matter: The Poetic Evolution of Thomas Kinsella, Syracuse University Press, 1995, pp. 1-13.

In the following essay, Jackson situates Kinsella's creative development in the historical context of Irish cultural identity and literary tradition.

If a career like Ezra Pound’s or, say, Hart Crane’s is still exemplary at this late date, the typical early difficulty for anyone setting up as poet in the United States would seem to be the need to reinvent the wheel. In the absence of any strong tradition of poetry, of anything like a national sense of what poetry should or might be like, and of any strong national respect for either the art or its practitioners, the neophyte American poet typically has had to define the art anew—even to invent himself or herself as an artist. In more convention-bound cultures like England or Ireland, with more uniform...