SOURCE: “The Phases of Kinsella's Poetic Career: Aims and Continuities,” in Thomas Kinsella, Twayne Publishers, 1996, pp. 11-26.

In the following essay, Badin provides an overview of the major themes, recurring motifs, and structural elements of Kinsella's poetry as they evolved throughout his career.

Works

Three major phases can be distinguished in Kinsella’s career. His early phase, represented by various collections of poems (Poems, Another September, Wormwood, Downstream, Nightwalker and Other Poems), ended in 1968. It is a phase of apprenticeship in which Kinsella explores many genres and modes, often with great virtuosity. Although there are striking differences between the first two volumes and the next three, his respect for traditional forms (ranging from complex stanzaic and rhyming patterns to a loose blank verse) and for traditional subjects (love, self-reflexivity, subjective meditations on the passing of time, mutability and mortality) give the five volumes a sense of unity. The...