SOURCE: O'Donoghue, Bernhard. “Involved Imaginings.” In The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland, edited by Neil Corcoran, pp. 171-87. Chester Springs, Penn: Ogmore-by-the-Sea Books, 1992.

In the following essay, O'Donoghue provides an overview of Paulin's career and defends the political realism of his poetry as a integral aspect of his artistic imagination, noting Paulin's admiration of James Joyce and placing Paulin within the tradition of European Romanticism.

The criticisms most commonly made of the poetry of Tom Paulin are, firstly, that it is over-cryptic, and, secondly, that it is more directly concerned with politics than it is proper for poetry to be. In this essay I want to argue that the crypticism is precisely a product of the reluctance to be political in a campaigning way, though Paulin's language and terms of reference are unflinchingly drawn from the public domain. There is no doubt that...