SOURCE: “Breaking The Shell of Solitude: Some Poems of Thomas Kinsella,” in Eire-Ireland, Vol. XIV, No. 1, Spring, 1979, pp. 80-92.

In the following essay, Broder examines the transition in Kinsella's poetry away from preoccupations with intellectual knowledge and rational order in favor of new explorations of emotional knowledge, introspection, and open-ended complexity.

Not long ago Thomas Kinsella, like Humpty Dumpty, had a great fall. There the analogy ends, however; for Kinsella’s fall, described in Notes from the Land of the Dead and Other Poems (1973),¹ does not leave him irretrievably shattered. Though he says, in the book’s first poem, “in my shell of solitude … I fell foul at the last / and broke in a distress of gilt and silver,” the poem concludes with a symbol that resembles, not a shattered egg, but one almost entirely whole. This is a challenging image; and a look at some earlier works...