SOURCE: “Small Gifts of Knowing,” in The Literary Review, Vol. 40, No. 4, Summer, 1997, pp. 561-65.

In the following essay, Kennedy discusses modernism, politics, and religion as elements of contemporary Irish poetry.

The poet Patrick Kavanagh once quipped that Ireland has a standing army of at least five thousand poets. This would seem to be no exaggeration. Despite Samuel Beckett's charge that the Irish as a nation “never gave a fart in its corduroys for any form of art whatsoever,” Patrick Crotty in Modern Irish Poetry (The Blackstaff Press, Belfast, 1995) notes, “Contemporary Ireland is clearly hospitable to new poetry,” though he adds, “Whether it is in any serious sense responsive to it is another matter.”

It seems to me that poetry and story are an integrated part of the lives of the Irish. In comparison to the United States, writing is far less institutionalized in Irish universities and is not...