Thomas Kinsella
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Thomas Kinsella (born May 4, 1928) is an Irish poet, translator, editor and publisher. His work, which is influenced by the modernist tradition, is considered to be amongst the most complex and intellectually demanding Irish poetry of the second half of the 20th century.
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Early life and work
Kinsella was born in Inchicore, Dublin but spent much of his childhood with relatives in rural Ireland. He was educated through the medium of Irish at the Model School, Inchicore, and the Christian Brothers-run O'Connell's School. He entered University College Dublin in 1946, initially to study science. After a few terms in college, he took up a post in the Irish Civil Service and continued his university studies at night, having switched to humanities.
His first poems were published in the university magazine The National Student and in Poetry Ireland. His first pamphlet, The Starlight Eye (1952), was published by Liam Miller's Dolmen Press, as was Poems (1956), his first book-length publication. These were followed by Another September (1958), Moralities (1960), Downstream (1962), Wormwood (1966), and the long poem Nightwalker (1967).
Marked as it was by the influence of W.H. Auden and dealing with a primarily urban landscape and with questions of romantic love, Kinsella's early work marked him out as distinct from the mainstream of Irish poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, which tended to be dominated by the example of Patrick Kavanagh.
Translations and editing
At Miller's suggestion, Kinsella turned his attention to the translation of early Irish texts. He produced versions of Longes Mac Unsnig and The Breastplate of St Patrick in 1954 and of Thirty-Three Triads in 1955. His most significant work in this area was collected in two important volumes. The first of these was The Táin, (Dolmen 1969 and Oxford 1970), a handsome and vigorous version of the Táin Bó Cúailnge illustrated by Louis le Brocquy.
The second, later, major work of translation was an anthology of Irish poetry An Duanaire: 1600-1900, Poems of the Dispossessed (1981), translated by Kinsella and edited by Seán Ó Tuama. He also edited Austin Clarke's Selected Poems and Collected Poems (both 1974) for Dolmen and The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1986).
Later poetry
In 1965, Kinsella left the Civil Service to become writer in residence at Southern Illinois University, and in 1970 he became a professor of English at Temple University.
In 1972, he started Peppercanister Press to publish his own work. This reflected an interest in the publishing process that dates back at least as far as helping set the type for The Starlight Eye twenty years earlier. The first Peppercanister production was Butcher's Dozen, a satirical response to the Widgery Tribunal into the events of Bloody Sunday. This poem drew on the aisling tradition and specifically on Brian Merriman's Cúirt An Mheán Óiche.
From this point on, Kinsella's work ceases to be Audenesque and the influence of American modernism, particularly the poetry of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Robert Lowell becomes evident. In addition, the poetry starts to focus more on the individual psyche as seen through the work of Carl Jung. These tendencies first appear in the poems of Notes from the Land of the Dead (1973) and One (1974).
In the 1980s, books like Her Vertical Smile (1985) Out of Ireland (1987) and St Catherine's Clock (1987) marked a move away from the personal to a poetry including historical trends. This move continued into a sometimes darkly satirical focus on more a contemporary landscape through the late 1980s and 1990s in such books as One Fond Embrace (1988), Personal Places (1990), Poems From Centre City (1990) and The Pen Shop (1996). His Collected Poems appeared in 1996 and again in an updated edition in 2001.