If you consult Hugh Kenner’s stillborn preface to Thomas Kinsella’s Poems 1956–1973 in the winter issue, 12 (1979) of Genre, The Genres of the Irish Literary Revival, you will understand my paraphrase: “Some critics are blandly there, a pervasive tone. The more interesting ones discover focal moments when a quality isolates itself: as in the opening of The Pound Era.” This paraphrase would be as unfair to Mr. Kenner as the original was to Kinsella, not merely because the yawn is infectious but because both statements ignore the subjects’ intentions. Mr. Kenner is so myopically attentive to focal moments, as if noticing only hearths in Whitehall Palace, that he disregards the structure that gives meaning to Kinsella’s images and effects. At the same time, in awaiting visual images, he is inattentive to non-visual effects within the dark diastole of Kinsella’s poetry. Finally, because Mr. Kenner brings too little wattage to the “current Irish literary situation” that he intends to illuminate, he misreads a poem and distorts issues.

In a 1979 issue of Eire-Ireland Daniel O’Hara has summarized concisely what other critics and readers of Kinsella have recognized: that from Nightwalker (1968) on this poet has developed

a complex lyric sequence that traces the history of a single consciousness as it moves back and forth between its present state of crisis and confusion and the past sources of its imaginative strengths. The ‘goal’ of the sequence is to increase understanding and acceptance of life by showing the necessary stages in the development of this consciousness.

We might add that “past sources” include myth and history. (The neuter references suggest that Mr. O’Hara sees no necessity to confuse the poetic persona with the poet.)

Just this suggestion that Kinsella’s poems have a larger architecture explains why a new arrangement of earlier poetry Poems, 1956–1973, might be issued as a necessary prologue to Peppercanister Poems 1972–1978.¹ Reading the poems as a sequence and attending to recurrences, alternations, and cycles can only enhance our understanding of focal moments, such as that selected by Mr. Kenner from “Ritual of Departure.” As within the poem the recurrent light before closure and the post-Union setting reflect eviction in “the slowly blazing eyes,” so within the series, the poems “Phoenix Park,” “Endymion,” “Worker in Mirror,” and the invocation of Technical Supplement suggest that eyes blaze with a terminal or ultimate understanding, won at great cost.

Such attention to the sequence ought to clarify the most difficult poems, even the one selected by Mr. Kenner, who has a keen eye for the opaque, to represent Kinsella’s “intensely private speech.” Never mentioning “Notes from the Land of the Dead,” the group of poems Hibernia praised as the most significant volume from Ireland since The Tower, the critic has quoted entirely “The Clearing,” one of the “other poems” attached to that volume. To clarify this poem one might examine it within the small series of five poems that are based on five books, as Maurice Harmon and Carolyn Rosenberg have done.² However, “Phoenix Park” and poems from “Notes …” might provide Mr. Kenner with that “reliable ground” he needs to judge “The Clearing.” In “Phoenix Park” we learn that love is predatory and requires an “answering hunger” (P, 119): “we eat pain in each other” (P, 122) and “giving without tearing is not possible” (P, 119). In “Endymion” Selene’s cycle of love wanes to the predatory “single drop” of Hecate’s owl (P, 154) (the phrase elsewhere signifies the humanizing tear and the Fall of man). The owl reappears “At the Crossroads” (P, 160), Hecate’s haunt, representing “all mouths everywhere so / in their need, turning on each furious / other.” “Sacrifice” reveals the residue of cannibalism in love’s clichés (P, 161). In “The Clearing” we find the hungering soul trapped in a skull, an idea basic to these five poems from “the books” as it is to beheading themes throughout ancient Irish literature. The “star-bright eyes,” “the fire and the gloom” begin love’s architecture: “A darkness at the heart of every fire, / Darkness, fire, darkness, threaded on each other—” (P, 125). The weary disclaimer that opens “The Clearing” echoes lines from another depressed poem, “Ely Place”: “a few / tentative tired endings over / and over …” (P, 167). “The Clearing” and the other intermittent austere poems in the series are beginnings as well, the necessary nights from which arises love, or the creations of mankind. Kinsella attempts to acknowledge our mortality and “to weave it into our lives” (P, 188) in order to create a Phoenix Nest, which becomes the compensating structure of his later volumes. Even in the bleakest poems, such as “Drowsing Over the Arabian Nights” (P, 183), the creative process allows us to endure our own share in Shahryar’s predatory love, as poem and title imply.

Rather than “an evidential world,” Kinsella’s imagery recreates an experienced world as perceived through shifting levels of consciousness: memory irrupts into reflection, phobia jostles daydream. In restricting clear visual images to moments ruled empirically, Kinsella observes a tradition defended by Wordsworth in the Prelude: “The bodily eye,” Wordsworth complained, is “in every stage of life the most despotic of our senses.” “To thwart this tyranny,” he continues, Nature “summons all the senses each to counteract the other” (XII, 130). Kinsella’s poems have a high incidence of tasting, touching, and hearing. Discoveries replace epiphanies, and discovering is more likely uncovering, too close at hand to be comfortable. When these moments recapture a child’s fears during the stage of self-differentiation, they may become forms of “the Uncanny.” Consider the opening of “38 Phoenix Street,” for example:

Look.
                    I was lifted up
past rotten bricks weeds
to look over the wall.
A mammy lifted up a baby on the other side.
Dusty smells. Cat. Flower bells
hanging down purple red.
Look.
                     The other. Looking.
My finger picked at a bit of dirt
on top of the wall and a quick
wiry redgolden thing
ran back down a little hold.

(Pp, 64)

The child confounds the other and himself, as the flower and salamander evoke some anatomical discovery, such as the child’s first tapping of blood. The image is visual and palpable, perhaps closer to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry’s definition of an organic image—“awareness of hearbeat, pulse, breathing, and digestion”—than to a merely tactile sensation. Frequently Kinsella fills larger spaces with these organic rhythms, as in “Minstrel”:

Outside, the heavens listened,
a starless diaphragm
stopped miles overhead
to hear the remotest whisper
of returning matter, missing
an enormous black beat.

(Pp, 66)

Often these images function as metaphors, providing rapid transport between modes of perceiving our private worlds—sexual, anatomical, psychological—and modes of perceiving or structuring shared experiences—history, myth, the commercial urban conventions. In “Nightwalker,” the speaker reminds us with phrases such as “musing thus” that these metaphorical hinges are merely opening different levels of his own thoughts: we track him easily as he observes televiewers, then imagines them to be first spirits in a Necropolis and then larvae in a waxen hive. In one passage (P, 105), the nightwalker, observing the Gemini, remembers the German twins who consulted him that morning about investing in Irish land. He recalls their faces, “livid with little splashes of blazing fat.” The next statement, “The oven door closes,” forms an inevitable but complex poem-in-itself which evokes fables about acquisition and burning such as the Nibelungenlied, Hansel & Gretel, and the rationalization of the Jewish holocaust. The transitions of “Nightwalker” are suppressed in the later poems where these various levels of response are presented dramatically, often in disjoined sections of the poem. The reader must move into the narrative center, draw relations, and allow himself to be reminded of significance as it has evolved elsewhere in the series.

The source of this multi-level imagery—historical, mythical, literary, psychological, personal—that emanates from one consciousness could be Pound, or Vico, who believed that “history was the actualization in time of possibilities that could be deduced by study of the individual mind; history moved in patterns discoverable in that mind,” in the words of Richard Ellmann.³ More likely, Kinsella’s mode is derived from Vico’s student Joyce, who dramatized this view of history as a projection of the anxieties and musings of Bloom and Stephen in “Circe” and of HCE in Finnegans Wake.

Mention of Joyce, “the tutelary spirit” of “Nightwalker” and perhaps the watcher over Kinsella’s entire series, brings us to another limitation of Mr. Kenner’s “preface,” one that spills into his “reflections.” Apparently knowing very little of Kinsella’s tradition, he misrepresents Yeats’s place in it. By the publication of “Nightwalker” in 1968 Yeats was no longer an active influence. After quoting from that poem—“The sonhusband / Coming in his power: mounting to glory / On his big white harse! …” (P, 108), Mr. Kenner explains, “Swift is here, seen through the eyes of Yeats and Joyce, all three presences managed by Thomas Kinsella.” The poem gives no evidence that Yeats is a watcher with Joyce and the nightwalker. Interpreting Swift as the object of their vision confuses the satirist with the pimp for Productive Investment mentioned on page 107, and therefore constitutes a pretty careless misreading.⁴

To draw Kinsella into a lengthy comparison with Yeats as Mr. Kenner does both in his “preface” and his “reflections” seems in 1980 parochial, and tedious to readers who have encountered a half-dozen more informed comparisons between Yeats and post-Yeatsian poets, including Kinsella’s own essays.⁵ Mr. Kenner would hold Kinsella to a standard of “poetry as it was defined for Ireland by Yeats,” require of Kinsella’s contemporary, post-holocaust poetry “some single emblem backed by a whole literature and culture,” and compare the two elegies—“In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” and “A Selected Life”—without reference to their incomparable intentions.

It seems impertinent for our critic to assess what Kinsella has done “for the speech of Republican Ireland,” first because Kinsella’s audience is not insular, and then because Kenner seems oblivious to what, from “a gapped, discontinuous, polyglot tradition,”⁶ Kinsella has created for himself and other readers and poets. Through his inspired translation of The Táin (Oxford, 1970), Kinsella has made Ireland’s primary heroic cycle as available to readers as The Song of Roland or Beowulf. Dolmen Press recently published An Duanaire, 100 poems in Irish from 1600–1900, arranged by Sean O Touma and translated by Kinsella, a labor of several years. Furthermore, as the editor of the new Oxford Book of Irish Verse, Kinsella will soon offer his own version of the Irish poetic tradition.

It may be clear where “the nervousness” and “silly paranoia,” by which Mr. Kenner accounts for the rejection of his preface, are actually manifested in this exchange. Kinsella was never nervous about the preface; he simply did not want one, foreseeing that half his life’s work might be preceded by uninspired prose. He consented to my suggestion that Mr. Kenner write the preface perhaps because they share an admiration for Pound’s poetry and because he admired that critic’s independence. (At that time neither of us had seen Mr. Kenner’s encomium on the cover of Basil Bunting’s 1978 collection.⁷) Kinsella neither had a part in sending back the preface, nor was he disappointed that a critic could not do for him what Kinsella himself had done in his preface and notes for Austin Clarke.⁸

Readers, and critics, might learn from the magnanimity reflected in Kinsella’s unselfish recovery of Irish literature and in his generosity toward other poets in his own poetry. Committed to excellence, he usually seeks his literary companions—Yeats, Pound, Goethe, O’Rahilly, Mann, Joyce—among those who live through their books. Although he admires Yeats, I doubt that he would pine for a movement, not even for the Movement Yeats fabled. For every Higgins or Gogarty a movement shelters, it expels a non-conformist such as Austin Clarke. Kinsella records Clarke’s visit to Coole Park and his forgiveness of Yeats’s inexplicable snubs: “So I forgot / His enmity.” Kinsella’s poem, entitled “Magnanimity,” goes on to offer a gentle answer to Clarke and, perhaps, to preface-writers, and to editors who seek prefaces:

Branches swayed and sank. You turned away and said
Coole might be built again as a place for poets.
Through the forbidden tree magnanimity passed.
I am sure that there are no places for poets,
Only changing habitations for verse to outlast.

(P, 95)

Notes

1. These volumes, published by Wake Forest University Press (1979), will be cited by initials and page numbers within the text: Poems 1956–1973 as P; Peppercanister Poems 1972–1978 as Pp.

2. Maurice Harmon, The Poetry of Thomas Kinsella (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1974); Carolyn Rosenberg, Let Our Gaze Blaze, unpublished dissertation at Kent State University, 1980. This latter work promises to be our most thorough study of Kinsella’s poetry.

3. Ulysses on the Liffey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 141.

4. In my letter to Mr. Kenner, which he has misrepresented in the footnote to his article, I point out “two misreadings”: “Yeats … hangs around to witness in the poem, as you read it. Swift’s presence in the poem seems even more improbable.”

5. Thomas Kinsella, “The Divided Mind” in Irish Poets in English, ed. Lucy (Cork: Mercier, 1973), pp. 208–18; and Davis, Mangan, Ferguson? Tradition and the Irish Writer (Dublin: Dolmen, 1970). See also Samuel Hynes, “Yeats and the Poets of the Thirties,” in Modern Irish Literature, ed. Porter and Brophy (New York: Iona, 1972), pp. 1–22; Maurice Harmon, Irish Poetry After Yeats (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1979); John Montague, “Under Ben Bulben,” in Shenandoah, 16, iv (Summer, 1965), 21–24; Thomas Parkinson, “Yeats and Contemporary Poetry,” in W. B. Yeats, The Later Poetry (Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1964), pp. 232–43.

6. Kinsella, “The Divided Mind,” p. 217.

7. “There is no better poet alive than Basil Bunting, no happier reader than one encountering ‘Villon’ or Briggflatts for the first time, no reader more fulfilled than one retracing their intricate masculine music after long acquaintance.” (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978).

8. Austin Clarke, Selected Poems, ed. Thomas Kinsella (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest Univ. Press, 1976). For a second example of critical magnanimity, see Robin Skelton’s “Comment” in The Malahat Review, July, 1980.