SOURCE: A review of The Dual Tradition: An Essay on Poetry and Politics in Ireland, in Ploughshares, Vol. 22, No. 2-3, Fall, 1996, pp. 243-45.

In the following review, Rosenthal offers a favorable assessment of The Dual Tradition.

Irish poetry has had a long, trauma-beset journey. In his book The Dual Tradition: An Essay on Poetry and Politics in Ireland, Thomas Kinsella leads us through its successive periods of “most radical adjustment and change.” He plunges into the matter more intimately than anyone since Yeats, and in far more precise detail than Yeats ever did. But he wears his sophistication lightly. His style is direct and vivid, with pointedly apt quotations.

Kinsella’s own poetic career—his subtle yet piercing original verse, together with his translations from the Irish in An Duanaire: Poems of the Dispossessed 1600–1900, in his anthology The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, and most notably in...