SOURCE: “Thomas Kinsella: ‘Nursed Out of Wreckage,’” in Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880-1980, Faber and Faber, 1985, pp. 135-45.

In the following essay, Deane discusses Kinsella's place in postwar Irish poetry, elements of structure and fragmentation in his verse, and his preoccupation with the violent imagery of biological, historical, and creative processes.

Once the major excitements of the Revival were over, there was inevitably a sense of disappointment and disillusion. The deaths of Yeats and Joyce, the emergence of two insular and petit-bourgeois states, one Catholic and the other Protestant in its ethos, the return of economic hardship and mass emigration, all contributed to that sullenness and disaffection so characteristic of the literature of the thirties and forties. The note of a deeper alienation was struck in the fiction of Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien and Francis Stuart and, less consistently, in the poetry of Austin...