[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 with Kinsella’s work, I replied that I would have to see what I was introducing; I would give it a try and see if I felt positive. The books were sent. Letters and phone calls ensued, and a visit from a Wake Forest academic, who divulged that Kinsella himself was nervous about what he feared might be an adverse “review.” I adduced the difference between a review and an introduction. An Introduction I eventually agreed to contribute, and I wrote and sent off the following. (Bracketed numbers refer to pages in Kinsella’s Poems 1956–1973, Wake Forest University Press, 1979.)

II

Some poets are blandly there, a pervasive tone. The more interesting ones afford focal moments when a quality isolates itself: as at the opening of “Ritual of Departure”:

A man at the moment of departure, turning
To leave, treasures some stick of furniture
With slowly blazing eyes, or the very door
Broodingly with his hand as it falls shut.

(p. 115)

Not like that literary property alert eyes shining, these eyes blaze with nightmare specificity, “slowly,” like a real fire, and blaze moreover midway in a carefully turned and summarizing sentence whose particulars belong to the evidential world. And later in the same poem,

The ground opens. Pale wet potatoes
Break into light. The black soil falls from their flesh,
From hands that tear them up and spread them out
In fresh disorder, perishable roots to eat.

(p. 116)

“Their flesh,” and the black soil potatoes’ flesh shares with rending hands, make this an exhumation rather than a spading, for a cannibal rather than a vegetable meal. So when we come in due course to social and historical observation—

                     Faces sharpen and grow blank
With eyes for nothing.
                                         And their children’s children
Venturing to disperse, some came to Dublin
To vanish in the city lanes

(p. 116)

—there is something distinctly sinister about that vanishing.

Nightmare glowing, fading, glowing, amid the equable pace of metered discourse, that is the effect to which the reader of Kinsella must accustom himself. Ghosts throng in these poems, shapes half-seen, our personal past, Ireland’s past, less assignable portents. “Phoenix Park” narrates a vision seen in a wine-glass become “ordeal-cup”:

                                         Figure echoes
Figure faintly in the saturated depths:
Revealed by faint flashes of each other
They light the whole confines: a fitful garden …
A child plucks death and tastes it; a shade watches
Over him; the child fades and the shade, made flesh,
Stumbles on understanding, begins to fade,
Bequeathing a child in turn; woman shapes pass
Unseeing, full of knowledge, through each other. …

(p. 120)

A page or so later we’ve an ordinary wine-glass again, just drained. “We finish and rise to go” (p. 122).

One needs to read enough of these poems to see how normal is this irruption of unsettling vision into recognizable experience. In some of the early ones the recognizable experience is the experience of reading formal stanzas. In later ones it’s less literary, more tied to specificities of place and season, the rhetoric a carefully straightforward naming:

The Chapelizod Gate. Dense trees on our right,
Sycamores and chestnuts around the entrance
To St. Mary’s Hospital.

(p. 117)

Metrical and acoustic signs enjoin us to read slowly, giving weight to each word, aware of “dense” and “sycamores” and “entrance” as rich mouth-filling syllabifications. If we patter through such lists we shall be unduly disturbed when we encounter, as we shall, the unpredictably portentous. And if that happens it’s our own fault, since for Kinsella, as for us if we learn to share his sensibility, a small adjective like “dense” is already portentous. (Try it over in your mouth.) “He was densely distressed,” wrote Joseph Conrad once, achieving something rich and strange out of unawareness, possibly, that he was violating English idiom. Kinsella’s “dense trees” is English idiom, but—come to think of it—a strange idiom, strange as Joyce’s “rare white forms” “sustaining vain gestures in the air.” Grant Kinsella his decentered sense of the normal and those eerie portents of his are continuous with it, a little more intense but not radically other. His straight lines bend, his floors wobble. Dead Yeats, in his quatrains, is eaten by “the tireless shadow-eaters”:

They eat, but cannot eat.
Dog faces in his bowels,
Bitches at his face,
He grows whole and remote.

(p. 98)

(The poem is called “Death in Ilium: in Yeats’s Centenary Year.”) “Whole and remote”: that’s a triumphant state for the poet who aimed at “ghostly solitude.” It’s also a relief for any Irish poet of Kinsella’s generation, a generation for which Yeats can constitute a major problem. If one can’t ignore such a predecessor, neither does one want to be listed among his supernumeraries. By good luck, Yeats lent himself to the ministrations of the learned “shadow-eaters,” who in dismembering and reconstructing him according to his own instructions turn him into an instance of his own System, the wholeness systematic, the remoteness algebraic. For this we may thank his central limitation: he had no inner knowledge whatever of Catholic Ireland, and was forced to substitute for its traditions, its theology and its night-sweats the famous apparatus of spooks and gyres, to lend the visions some accreditation:

Where got I that truth?
Out of a medium’s mouth. …

But a people who wake their dead and pray for them (see Kinsella’s “Office for the Dead,” p. 79) have no need of mediums.

Knowing these people, Kinsella has discovered the freedom to derive from Yeats without being derivative, and to invoke Joyce like a tutelary spirit:

Watcher in the tower, be with me now
At your parapet, above the glare of the lamps.
Turn your milky spectacles on the sea
Unblinking; cock your ear.

(p. 108)

“Watcher in the tower,” that might be Yeats at Thoor Ballylee, but in its context (“Nightwalker,” II) it’s Joyce at Sandycove. Under his and the poet’s gaze something rises from the dark sea:

Two blazing eyes
Then a whole head. Shoulders of shadowy muscle
Lit from within by joints and bones of light.
Another head … animal, with nostrils straining
Open, red as embers: goggle eyes;
A spectral whinny! Forehoofs scrape at the night,
A rider grunts and urges.
Father of Authors!
It is himself! In silk hat and jowls,
Accoutred in stern jodhpurs! The sonhusband
Coming in his power: mounting to glory
On his big white harse! …

(p. 108)

Swift is here, seen through the eyes of Yeats and Joyce, all three presences managed by Thomas Kinsella: the poetry of a haunted literature that has learned to rehearse and ironize the nightmare from which it cannot awake.

III

A check came from Wake Forest, then a silence of some weeks; then a frigid letter of rejection (“Profoundly regret that I cannot use … would neither encourage sales nor direct the reader to Kinsella’s very special powers … Your reserved tone and manifest lack of interest. …”)

And: “I had understood that your essay would explain reasons for re-issuing these poems and that it would recommend Kinsella’s work. Instead, it digresses from the important issues in his poetry, and in terms that range from tepid to cool.”

There was also some quibbling about whether the watcher isn’t Yeats after all.¹

IV

One normally buries such absurdities. I decided this time the story was worth telling because it illuminates so economically a normally unmentioned component of the current Irish literary situation: the nervousness, the silly paranoia, the fear of not being liked, the constant shuffling for position in an undefined game. All this is endemic among the bards, and infects their sponsors. Any two interested parties will be quick to agree that all the above is true of everybody else.

I once reviewed—very favorably—in the New York Times Book Review a work by a well-known living Irish poet and received a strange letter in which he was grateful for my not attacking him.

“They never speak well of one another,” said Dr. Johnson of Irish impartiality. Nor do they always know when they are well spoken of. “Great hatred, little room”: that is not a milieu in which to assemble a Movement. As one broods on such themes Yeats’s gratitude for Coole grows intelligible.

And yet a woman’s powerful character
Could keep a swallow to its first intent;
And half a dozen in formation there,
That seemed to whirl upon a compass point,
Found certainty upon the dreaming air. …

And he next spoke of “intellectual sweetness.” It is easy to condescend to the Revival now, but the more one examines it the more remarkable seems its unity of purpose, or appearance of unity.

V

And Kinsella: “Dr. Kinsella,” a friend insists: the poems of Dr. Kinsella. A proper treatment—not an Introduction meant to predispose readers—would note how the purified diction, the found voice, is accompanied by a withdrawal into intense, intensely private speech. “In the Ringwood,” an early poem, offers a reader gestures of hospitality—familiar Victorian diction, “red lips,” “the green hill side,” and a six-line stanza thrice rhymed. But these are conventions, a reader soon senses, not meant to be trusted; for though the year is 1958 the stanza and diction pertain to “The Blessed Damozel”:

As sharp a lance as the fatal heron
There on the sunken tree
Will strike in the stones of the river
Was the gaze she bent on me.
O her robe into her right hand
She gathered grievously.

(p. 23)

—a language impossible to believe in, which is just the point: not accommodation to a reader, not living ceremony, but a husk of ceremony, due to wither before our eyes. As it does:

Dread, a grey devourer,
Stalks in the shade of love.
The dark that dogs our feet
Eats what is sickened of.
The End that stalks Beginning
Hurries home its drove.

(p. 24)

So as early as that we have the Kinsella Effect: an irruption of darkness and of violent enigmatic language. As early as that, too, the reader is placed as in a Piranesi dungeon, where surfaces are illusory.

And in a late poem it is not even clear what is there to be mistaken for a surface. I quote “The Clearing” intact:

‘… there is so little I can do any more
but it is nearly done …’
It is night. A troubled figure
is moving about its business
muttering between the fire and the gloom.
Impenetrable growth surrounds him.
Owlful. Batful.
Great moths of prey.
‘… and still the brainworm will not sleep
squirming behind the eyes
staring out from its narrow box …’
He stops suddenly and straightens.
The eyes grow sharper
—and the teeth!
‘… and then the great ease
when something that was stalking us
is taken—the head cut off
held by the fur
the blood dropping hot
the eye-muscles star-bright to my jaws! …’

(p. 184)

Speech alternating with narration; but neither will serve as reliable ground from which to gauge the other. So vertigo afflicts the whole poem, and the reader goes into free fall along with everything else. Insofar as “The Clearing,” or almost any late Kinsella poem, treats a reader at all, it treats him as an element in the poem’s strategy: not someone addressed, but someone to be deceived, by various devices of rhetoric and typography, into expecting what will not be provided. For that is how it is in the world of these poems: nothing we might expect will be provided.

                               … The books agree,
one hopes for too much.
It is ridiculous.
We are elaborate beasts.
If we concur it is only
In our hunger—the soiled gullet …
and sleep’s airy nothing:
and the moist matter of lust
and the agonies of death. …

(p. 183)

Rejecting any more communality than that, rejecting everything save the license to tell private nightmares, these poems take the important risk of rejecting the grounds of poetry itself: poetry as it was defined for Ireland by Yeats (“Irish poets, learn your trade”). A “trade” is objective, that for which standards and criteria exist. Kinsella’s poetry is definable as that which he does. Therein lies both its interest and its risk. Therein too lies the seed of much anxiety among his well-wishers, for the question, how you judge his poetry, converts readily into the question, what do you think of Tom?

The necessity of disengaging from Yeats seems self-evident, and it is difficult to think of a living or recent Irish poet who didn’t, one way or another, accomplish that disengagement pretty completely. Not only was Yeats’s rhetoric bound up with a pose it would be disastrous to try to emulate, not only were his themes those of a long-dead Ascendancy (“Scorn the sort now growing up”—meaning the Catholic middle classes into which most Irish poets are born): not only that, but his criteria were those of English Romanticism and the English Renaissance, incompatible with the contemporary modes of Irish self-esteem. Robert Gregory was “Our Sidney and our perfect man.” Kinsella’s Gregory, Seán O Riada (1931–1971), protagonist of an ambitious elegy in The Peppercanister Poems, was not only “Ireland’s foremost composer and musician” but a virtuoso of Latin, Greek, French, philosophy, the connoisseurship of science fiction, a mime, a shrimp fisherman, a drinker. Yet no such emblem as “our Sidney” is available.

Pierrot limping forward in the sun
out of Merrion Square, long ago,
in black overcoat and beret,
pale as death from his soiled bed,
swallowed back: animus
brewed in clay, uttered
in brief meat and brains, flattened
back under our flowers.
Gold and still he lay,
on his secondlast bed. Dottore! A
withered smile,
the wry hands lifted. A little while
and you may not …

Pierrot, Shakespeare’s “second-best bed” and Joyce’s memorable play on that phrase, a scrap of Italian (the sick man playful), an allusion to John xiv.19: it is by such indirections that the modern poet supplies the lack of some single emblem backed by a whole literature and culture.

“A Selected Life” and “Vertical Man,” the pair of O Riada elegies, are accompanied by fifteen pages of prose which engagingly establish the dead man’s kind of presence. Here is one measure of what Kinsella’s intensely solipsistic verse cannot accomplish; when he would give us information, even the kind of iconic information around which a personal legend may gather, he knows he must do so in prose. What Yeats had made available was unusable; and what Yeats did not do for the speech of Republican Ireland still remains to be done.

Note

1. “Joyce’s Martello Tower,” we read on p. 107; the watcher has “milky spectacles,” and in lines not quoted above “Howth twinkles across the bay.” “Father of Authors! It is himself!,” “sonhusband,” and “big white harse” are based on details in Finnegans Wake (New York, 1939), pp. 214, 627, 10.