SOURCE: “Thomas Kinsella: An Anecdote and Some Reflections,” in The Genres of Irish Literary Revival, edited by Ronald Schleifer, Pilgrim Books, 1979, pp. 179-87.

In the following essay, Kenner discusses the problem of assessing Kinsella's self-styled verse in light of Yeats's daunting influence and the self-consciousness of modern Irish poets.

I

To have been born in 1928, the year Yeats published The Tower, would seem a destiny heavy enough for any Irish poet. Thomas Kinsella passed his young manhood moreover in what he has called “those flat years in Ireland at the beginning of the 1950’s, depressed so thoroughly that one scarcely noticed it.” Still, he managed to start publishing poems as early as 1952, and by 1978 had accumulated a respectable two-volume oeuvre (Poems 1956–1973, and Peppercanister Poems 1972–1978) for Wake Forest to publish in the U.S. At Wake Forest they thought an Introduction appropriate. Would I write it?

Not being familiar...