Thomas Kinsella

Poet

• Born: May 4, 1928
• Birthplace: Inchicore, Ireland
• Died: December 22, 2021
• Place of death: Dublin, Ireland

Irish poet

Biography

The generous international critical response that contemporary Irish poetry has received tends to overlook the poetry of Thomas Kinsella. Yet his body of work—nearly fifty collections of poetry published between 1952 and 2000, and notable translations of Irish classics from Gaelic— provided a prosodic and cultural yardstick against which the poetry of his Irish contemporaries may be measured. He was a native Dubliner, and his devotion to Dublin’s cityscape and to the people of its core had a central significance in his poetry, charting a heartfelt terrain marked by the depredations of time and the callousness of power but also graced by fidelity and persistence.

Kinsella’s attachment to Dublin, which performed the important cultural duty of keeping the city on the country’s poetic map, functioned both as homage and critique. The homage had its source in the city life of his childhood—his father, memorably commemorated in the long poem “The Messenger,” worked at the Guinness brewery. Kinsella attended University College Dublin and subsequently had a successful career in the Irish civil service. His critique of contemporary Dublin—“Nightwalker” is a particularly powerful instance—derives in part from his civil service years.

In 1958, Kinsella married Eleanor Walsh, with whom he would have three children. In 1965, he left the civil service and accepted a teaching position at the University of Southern Illinois. A consolidation of the reputation established by his early work quickly ensued with such publications as Wormwood (1966) and Nightwalker and Other Poems (1968). These books throw into starker relief the agonistic Kinsella inscribed in the personae of the early poems. These personae represent at once the most challenging and the most familiar aspects of Kinsella’s poetry. They articulate a fretful, restless, rootless state of mind, replete with existential anguish and deprived of a culture or value system that might alleviate it—as, for example, in “Baggot Street Deserta” (Another September, 1958) and “A Country Walk” (Downstream, 1962)

Kinsella left Southern Illinois in 1970 to take up a professorship of English at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he taught for two decades. Throughout his career, he had been intimately connected with Dolmen Press, a small Dublin publishing house that sought to maintain the Irish small-press tradition and had published Kinsella’s first pamphlets of verse in the early 1950s. The cultural dimension of this involvement found further expression in the establishment of Kinsella’s own press, Peppercanister, in 1972. Beginning with Butcher’s Dozen in 1972, this press published most of Kinsella’s subsequent verse and has permitted him to publish long poems and extended poetic sequences in a booklet form that does not have to conform to the whims of the marketplace. Control and ownership of the means of his own poetic production was a resonant cultural achievement of which the poet was well aware, as his critical writings demonstrate.

Blood and Family (1988) and From Centre City (1994), both published by Oxford University Press, are essentially collections of the later Peppercanister poems. In keeping with the publishing commitment of Peppercanister, these later poems have a more public dimension while preserving and refining the existentialist energy and neomodernist prosody of his earlier work. Particularly expressive of the Kinsella aesthetic is the manner in which these poems explore the concept of sequence, in both its formal and temporal senses. Among the better-known of the Peppercanister poems are “Butcher’s Dozen: A Lesson for the Octave of Widgery,” dealing with the events and repercussions of Bloody Sunday in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1972; “The Good Fight,” commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of John F. Kennedy; and “The Messenger.” From an imaginative as well as a cultural perspective, Peppercanister is a unique accomplishment in contemporary Irish literature.

Kinsella’s cultural commitments may also be appreciated in the place occupied by the Irish language in his work. Many of his contemporaries translated or otherwise availed themselves of the rich repository of Irish verse. In Kinsella’s case, however, the attempt to reconstitute a usable past in Irish poetry was a crucial expression of attempts to come to terms with the alienation, solitude, inarticulateness, and lack of cultural values that suffuse his poetry. This attempt was on one hand doomed to failure, since the Gaelic world that it addresses is irretrievably lost as a viable polity and as a living culture. On the other hand, to express the dimensions of the loss, and to give it imaginative and linguistic form in translation, was an act of impressive cultural piety, integrity, and conviction. This act of retrieval and homage attains optimum thematic range and expressive versatility in Kinsella’s translations for An Duanaire, 1600–1900: Poems of the Dispossessed (1981). His translation of the medieval epic Táin bó Cúailnge (The Táin, 1969), one of the most important legendary cycles of Irish culture, is still the standard translation used in classrooms throughout the English-speaking world.

In all the major aspects of his career—his sense of Dublin, the spiritual openness of his existential soundings, the cherishing of verse as a material production in his publishing activity, and the cultural drama implicit in his translations from the Irish—Kinsella traversed a singular and solitary path. As a result, he seemed somewhat eccentric to developments in contemporary Irish poetry. It might also be argued that it is the distinctive trajectory of his career and commitments that made his poetry a landmark in twentieth-century Irish literature.

Kinsella was married to Eleanor (Walsh) Kinsella from 1955 until her death in 2017. Kinsella died in a Dublin hospital on December 22, 2021, at the age of ninety-three. He was survived by their three children, ten grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

Bibliography

Abbate Badin, Donatella. Thomas Kinsella. New York: Twayne, 1996. Print.

Cowell, Alan. “Thomas Kinsella, Evocative, and Debated, Irish Poet, Dies at 93.” The New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/books/thomas-kinsella-dead.html. Accessed 25 Feb. 2022.

Harmon, Maurice. The Poetry of Thomas Kinsella: “With Darkness for a Nest.” 1974. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities, 1975. Print.

Harmon, Maurice. Thomas Kinsella: Designing for the Exact Needs. Portland: Irish Acad., 2008. Print.

Jackson, Thomas H. The Whole Matter: The Poetic Evolution of Thomas Kinsella. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1995. Print.

John, Brian. “Irelands of the Mind: The Poetry of Thomas Kinsella and Seamus Heaney.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 15.2 (1989): 68–92. Print.

John, Brian. Reading the Ground: The Poetry of Thomas Kinsella. Washington: Catholic U of Amer. P, 1996. Print.

Johnston, Dillon. Irish Poetry after Joyce. 2nd ed. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1997. Print.

McGuinness, Arthur E. “Fragments of Identity: Thomas Kinsella’s Modernist Imperative.” Colby Library Quarterly 23.4 (1987): 186–205. Print.

O’Hara, Daniel. “Love’s Architecture: The Poetic Irony of Thomas Kinsella.” Boundary 2 9.2 (1981): 123–35. Academic Search Complete. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.

O’Hara, Daniel. “The Poetic Impulse: An Interview with Thomas Kinsella.” Contemporary Poetry 4.1 (1981): 1–18. Print.

Skloot, Floyd. “The Evolving Poetry of Thomas Kinsella.” New England Review 18.4 (1997): 174–87. Print.

Tubridy, Derval. Thomas Kinsella: The Peppercanister Poems. Dublin: U Coll. Dublin P, 2001. Print.