Thomas Kinsella: President Higgins and fellow writers pay tribute to a great poet

President Michael D Higgins has led tributes to the poet Thomas Kinsella, who has died,aged 93.

“All those with a love of Irish poetry and culture will be saddened to have learned today of the death of Thomas Kinsella, one of Ireland’s finest poets,” the President said. “His reputation at home and abroad was one of being of a school that sought an excellence that did not know borders.

“In addition to his rich contribution to the school syllabus for generations of students, where he once held a rare distinction as being a living poet on the syllabus, Thomas Kinsella’s work retained a fierce urgency and relevance for readers throughout life. Not least his work tackling the gap between the aspirations of what Irish society should be and that which he saw before him. That ethical pursuit was attempted through rigorously honed lines.

“Thomas Kinsella, in addition to his own work, leaves a strong legacy in his translations from early Irish, most notably his collaboration with artist Louis le Brocquy on The Táin. That beautiful work came from a poet who valued and empathised with the Irish tradition.

Thomas Kinsella, one of Ireland’s finest poets, has died, aged 93

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“I had the great pleasure in being present for one of Thomas’s last public engagements, when we visited his old primary school, Model School, Inchicore, in 2019, a place like so many in his native Dublin 8 that he immortalised in his work. He remained to the end a truly remarkable man with a special grace that I recall from that occasion.

“Sabina and I would like to offer our deepest sympathies to his family and Thomas Kinsella’s wide circle of friends at home and abroad.”

Dublin’s Lord Mayor Alison Gilliland expressed her deep sadness. “I was very sorry to hear of the death of Thomas Kinsella and I would like to extend my sympathies to his daughters Sarah and Mary, his son John, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and his many friends and colleagues,” she said. “Like many other Irish people of a certain age, I was introduced to the words of Thomas Kinsella through the Leaving Cert curriculum and his poetry, Mirror in February and Another September,” said the Lord Mayor.

“His pride in his home city of Dublin shone through his work and as he said on receiving the Honorary Freedom of the City of Dublin in Dublin’s City Hall on May 24th, 2007: “Dublin gave many important things their first shape and content for me. I learned to look at the world through the rich reality of the inner city – a living history, with shades of Swift and Robert Emmett in my neighbourhood as I grew up; with the stories of my own two families to be learned: coming and settling in inner Dublin from Wicklow and Westmeath; and the stories of a number of close friends, some with ancient Irish names – one from the far West, a native speaker of Irish; others descended from Norman and post Cromwellian invaders. All reasonably contented together; happy to be where they were.”

The Dublin flags on the Mansion House and City Hall will fly at half-mast to mark his passing.

Many of his fellow poets and critics also paid tribute.

John F Deane
Ever since falling in love with poetry, mainly through reading Thomas Kinsella's poem Mirror in February and that supreme final line, "not young, and not renewable, but man", I have been devoted to the work of Kinsella and his loss will mark, for me, the end of a great age of poetry.

The Peppercanister series of poems will remain a monumental work, each small book adding to an intense exploration of human suffering and resilience, each book moving into more profound areas of experience and a more penetrating music and language. I was blessed to work with him over a number of those final publications and the first view of a new manuscript was like a Christmas gift to me.

From the power and ambition of the early work with its lyrical grace and its rich awareness of the tradition of poetry in English and Irish, through his exemplary responses, in poetry, to the troubles in the North, to the public and more private losses of figures of our times, such as Seán O’ Riada and John F. Kennedy, Kinsella provoked, celebrated and disturbed our Irish psyche in a unique and unforgettably valuable life’s work. “Salut. Slán. Yob tvoyu mat’. Master, your health.”

Gerald Dawe
I met Thomas Kinsella first in the 1980s in Galway after he had given a reading at NUIG (UCG as then was). I was somewhat in awe of the figure of Kinsella back then and indeed retained a certain degree of awe when I got to know him better in the years thereafter. He and Eleanor, his wife, would visit us in Dún Laoghaire, and we would natter away, sometimes politics, sometimes literature, sometimes what was happening here at home but also in the world, particularly America.

My wife and I visited him and Eleanor in Philadelphia and the laughter and chat echoes now in my mind alongside the challenges of ageing and health issues. But always there was a sense of a moral order and an unshakeable view of Irish literary achievement of his own generation, in particular Richard Murphy, who Tom considered never really received due recognition.

Tom was a key part of the last great generation of Irish modernists reaching back to his beloved Joyce and like the city he came from, and the streets and mood music of that interior world, he could recall his upbringing in the 1930s and ’40s and ’50s as if it was literally just yesterday. I’ve engaged with Kinsella’s poetry and criticism since that day in Galway 50 years ago but what I hear is that utterly distinctive accent, the wry smile, and the formidable mighty intellect which believed poetry was the truly, radical art form because it took time to make it new.

Thomas McCarthy
The death of Thomas Kinsella seems like the final blow, time's final levelling of a prodigious and monumental presence in Irish poetry. A modernist and patriot, a mandarin both as civil servant and poet, Kinsella's towering authority in Southern Irish poetry was never challenged or shaken. His death is like the disappearance of a great house, a Malton-like edifice fallen away.

He began with an assembly of unassailable lyrics, hard as granite, polished and beautiful like the best poems of the British “Movement” yet indisputably Irish, as Irish as Dublin cobblestones and Inchicore heavy machinery. His collections Another September and Nightwalker and Other Poems are unrivalled achievements in the post-Yeats Irish world. They are dark, achieved, with uncanny pacing, where a distinctive Dublin “shade enters, // patrolling the hive of his brain.” He was the first Irish poet to create this poetry of process, of a thinking process and long meditation.

The work does not suffer fools gladly. Kinsella could also be provoked to rhetorical writing when rhetoric was called for, both in calling to account the Widgery Tribunal and in remembering John F Kennedy. And yet it is the glorious difficulty of the poems that are his great achievement, the importance of them and their great grandeur. We can only stand back amazed at the achievements of his long life, at the assertions of a Dublin consciousness in every one of his books. Yes, his passing marks the end of that Dublin era of the truly great.

Colm Tóibín
Eleanor, Thomas Kinsella's wife, came from Lucas Park, close to the Slaney, at the edge of the Ringwood, south of Enniscorthy. It was in her family house that he wrote Another September, and in the surrounding area he set In the Ringwood and A Country Walk.

Kinsella was often to be seen walking in the streets of Enniscorthy when I was starting to read and relish his work. One Saturday in August 1972, I was standing in the Market Square when I saw him walking up Slaney Street with his nephew, Paul Walsh. That morning’s Irish Times had a review by Michael Hartnett of Kinsella’s new book, Notes from the Land of the Dead. One of the sentences read: “Notes from the Land of the Dead is the most important book to come out of Ireland or its neighbour island since Yeats’ Responsibilities.”

At first, I struggled with these new poems which had abandoned the formal, graceful systems Kinsella had perfected in his earlier books. These poems were filled with mystery, magic, strangeness and obscurity, but there was also something deliberate, serious, compulsive in them, something which pushed through the real and the apparent towards some shimmering and unearthly clarity as though every phrase had been cut into stone, or was all that was left, all that was sayable, in the short time when sound faded and before elemental silence began.

Peter Sirr
Some poets you think will be with you forever: they seem indestructible. Thomas Kinsella was a looming, magisterial presence in Irish poetry whose subdued interiority was out of step with a poetic culture which tends to prize, and to expect, the kind of clarity, sociability and intimacy of address he wasn't much interested in.

He extended the boundaries of the poem; he also offered a model of independence of spirit, indifference to fashions, and concentrated seriousness that we could be doing with. He began as a scrupulously controlled formalist, marshalling argument and rhythm with impressive skill and delicacy in poems like Another September, A Lady of Quality, Cover Her Face or Mirror in February, but the later work was grounded in the process and in the difficulty of utterance. He reached us as a sequence of voices, all subdued, all self-questioning, speaking painfully out of “failure and increase, /the stagger and recovery of spirit”.

Kinsella’s poetry was always a relentless search for order. The poems enact intensely private dramas, obsessively attentive to the footsteps of the self, yet they do so in structures so formal and in language so ornately stripped that it’s like looking at Keats’s urn: the artefact is public, minutely crafted, yet difficult: half its force, its resonance lying in its encoded austerities. It wasn’t an easy route. As one poem puts it: “I have devoted/my life, my entire career, /to the avoidance of affectation/ the way of entertainment”.

In a world where all gratification must be instant and well sugared his work will go on reminding us of the necessary pleasure of difficulty. Dennis O’Driscoll once likened reading him to adjusting to the dark in a cinema: “you do gradually become accustomed to the kind of atmosphere and the kind of light that you’re working in”. We have to do without the remarkable man’s presence now, but any serious reader of poetry needs to adjust to his particular dark.

William Wall
I'm sad to hear that Thomas Kinsella has died. His work shocked, surprised, intrigued and delighted me in school at a time when he was the only living poet on the curriculum. Later I came to love his terse, dark imagery and his urbane continental thought processes which, nevertheless, archioved his working class childhood and the streets and lanes of Dublin that he knew so well. Although it must be said that Butcher's Dozen is anything but urbane - a furious satire worthy of Swift. His translation of the Táin (illustrated by another great, Louis le Brocquy) is an outstanding modernisation of the language used to engage with out mythology. For years I had a long playing record of him reading - I still have it but no record player - and his voice, which never lost its rich Dublin accent, is still in my head. I don't think that voice will ever leave me.

Hugh Maxton
Hugh Maxton is orphaned once again. Once when Austin Clarke died. Now, now more fundamentally, with Thomas Kinsella's passing.

Lucy Collins
To encounter a poem by Thomas Kinsella is to open our minds to a world of exacting thought and powerful symbolic resonance. Each time we re-read his work the intensity of this first experience is renewed; teaching his poetry brings new questions and insights to every discussion.

Kinsella’s lifelong practice of intense self-scrutiny is combined with an unflinching view of modern Ireland and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths. His poems turn inward, not with the aim of self-revelation, but to provoke us to consider our own being in the world, and the combined pleasure and suffering that define the human condition.

Both in his chosen subject matter and his willingness to re-write his work – even long after first publication – Kinsella extends the boundaries of knowledge through the closest attention to language and form, but also through an enduring commitment to poetic practice. So, his work is characterised by both continuity and transformation, his Collected Poems revealing the painstaking evolution of thought and craft, each new phase extending or refining the last, oblivious to critical trends.

Kinsella’s independence of thought releases his readers from the constraints of orthodoxy. This most testing of poets is also the one who grants us the greatest freedom of thought.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin 
I am saddened by this loss in a particular way, since Thomas Kinsella's presence has felt like a reassurance that it was still possible to be a poet of absolute integrity. His friendship and Eleanor's, her sharp wit and his steady, farsighted intellectual honesty, have meant much over many years when I saw neither of them.

Kinsella was compelled to use language to tell truth, and to resist warping or overstating the truths he saw, as poets are so often tempted to do. His attention to the movement of language and the demands of poetic form is exemplary, but he gives more weight to the words as vehicles of reality than any poet I know. I think of the brilliant excursion back through time in The Messenger, and how the gravity of a man’s life and work shines through the poem. That reversal could have seemed a mere device, but the seriousness of the language makes us realize that this is how memory works, framing early scraps and family stories in the consciousness of the present. Like a great photographer he gives us the hard outside, the surface of reality and makes it pulsate with meaning.

John McAuliffe
I'll never forget picking up Thomas Kinsella's New Poems 1973, and hearing spoken English – "It's all the one"; "You are a real angel" – echoing and resonating even as he laid in, just as excitingly, phrases from an altogether different register, abstract images of chaos which seemed more mythological than anything by his contemporaries – "hesitate, cease to exist, glitter again, / dither in and out of a mother liquid / on the turn, welling up", as he writes, unforgettably (describing his own birth, or the first landing of an evolved being? Both), in the first of those new poems. Reading his poems felt like discovering the world.

That book was part of a run of publications whose excellence matches anything in Irish literature since Yeats: his transformational and modernising version of The Táin (in 1969), such a great resource for writers and readers ever after, the 1970s Peppercanister pamphlets which cleave to exact observation and then suddenly apply some arcane, often Jungian perspective to throw an entirely different light on what had seemed so brilliantly ordinary (and whose rich seam he continued to mine up till the publication of Late Poems (2013). And then there was Butcher's Dozen (1972), his outraged immediate response to the Widgery Tribunal's report on Bloody Sunday and its "cold putting aside of truth". Kinsella wrote and published the poem, adapting the aisling via Brian Merriman's Midnight Court, within a week of the report. Its 50th anniversary is being marked in January by a new Carcanet edition, whose text and design he oversaw last month.

Although he will be forever identified as the poet of Dublin, he lived on and off in Philadelphia for decades. I used to visit him there when I was teaching at Villanova in 2010. He and Eleanor lived in a rowhouse in the Center City district, a house whose white walls were lined with the Louis Le Brocquy images from The Táin, whose magnified presence in his life, there in the white-walled living room, seemed typical of the way his work stayed in touching distance with myth and the primitive forces which drive us.

Adrienne Leavy
I first met Thomas Kinsella when I was a doctoral student studying his work. He and Eleanor were unfailingly kind and generous to me over the years and I will be forever indebted to them both.

Kinsella’s astonishing body of work began with the early Audenesque lyric poetry of the 1950s which was superseded in his mature work by a more open-ended, modernist approach that rejected conventional poetic forms. Kinsella was first and foremost a Dublin poet, but his work was broader in scope and addressed universal concerns such as mankind’s propensity for violence and meditations on the human condition, much of which was mediated through Jungian themed poems of psychic exploration.

Kinsella’s contribution as a translator, editor and anthologist is immeasurable, and his scholarship in works such as An Duanaire 1600-1900: Poems of the Dispossessed, and his 1969 translation of the vernacular epic, Táin Bó Cúailnge, should serve as the lodestar for future generations. In The Dual Tradition, Kinsella analysed the challenges facing contemporary Irish poets when confronting their dual heritage of Gaelic literature and Irish literature in English, a challenge he underscored in his anthology, The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, a comprehensive survey of Irish poetry from the pre-Christian era to the modern day.

The artistic integrity that informs Kinsella's body of work was mirrored in the personality of Kinsella the man. His absence leaves an unassuageable void in Irish poetry and in the life of his family and friends. 
Adrienne Leavy is the editor of a collection of essays on Thomas Kinsella's work which will be published in 2022 by Wake Forest University Press. 

Conor O'Callaghan
I'd been thinking a lot about Thomas Kinsella anyway. It was a wonder he was still alive, still amongst us. For a couple of decades now, he was out there alone, like the last survivor of a dispensation long collapsed. Publishing sporadically with his Peppercanister imprint, scarcely anthologised, unheard of by two generations of British and American poets, unread by one generation of Irish poets apart from those early formal lyrics on the Leaving syllabus. Dreams fled away…? That one.

Kinsella was Ireland’s greatest modernist poet. In the early ’60s, he published The Táin and went to America. He cast off the metres of empire as a rotten lot, and embraced Pound’s fragmentation. His collections of the late ’60s and early 70s – Nightwalker, Notes from Land of the Dead, One and Other Poems – are among the wildest and most extraordinary books ever published by an Irish poet. Out there, in every sense. Searing anatomizations of the psyche in extremis. Funny too. One poem from that period contains surely the greatest chat-up line in Irish poetry: the Blue Nun’s on me…

Kinsella had zero time for smarmy gladhanding, playing the poet, versifying those platitudes the world wants to hear from poetry. I admired that. He won’t get the state funeral he so deserves. He would have hated it anyway. Will he be read by future generations? 99 per cent of poets are not, and that’s being generous. I’d love to think so. I’d love if his death now, at 93, resulted in his best work being discovered by young poets and shared around like news that stays news.

David Wheatley
There is a photograph in Thomas J Jackson's study of Thomas Kinsella, The Whole Matter, captioned: 38 Phoenix Street (with poet). 38 Phoenix Street is Kinsella's childhood home, and such is Kinsella's awe in its presence that he has turned his back on the photographer. The trance state is forgivable: not since Joyce have Dublin's very bricks of Dublin been numbered so reverently, the memories harvested so carefully of living and dead in this phantom city where "death roves our memories igniting /love". It is remarkable to think that Kinsella's 1956 debut, Poems, is almost twice as close in time to Joyce's Ulysses as it is to us today. To put it like that suggests Kinsella's distance from the present moment, but even as its most complex his is an art that remains intimate, sustaining, and humanly available.

Butcher’s Dozen, his stop-press reaction to Bloody Sunday, has just been reissued, and there is a school of thought that this poem damaged Kinsella’s reputation, in some quarters at least. But the art itself remain serenely unbothered by such vagaries. The Peppercanister pamphlets chart a 40-year arc – another form of time-travel – only reaching completion in the beatific formulations of Love Joy Peace (“peace and nothingness of the last end”). There are not many modern poets whose vision can remind readers of Dante’s Paradiso, but Thomas Kinsella is one.

Theo Dorgan
He came across always as urban and urbane, on the face of it a reserved man with an austere and sometimes forbidding aesthetic; Thomas Kinsella was the quintessential Man in The Yeatsian Mask. Behind the mask there lurked a wicked sense of humour, great tenderness towards his origins and his ancestors, and a passionate, disarming, enduring love for his wife, his life's companion, Eleanor.

If he was savagely dismissive of almost all contemporary poetry, as he often was, he took, or appeared to take, the same dismissive attitude towards his own work. He was, of course, mistaken on both counts, not least in the undervaluing of his own poems. Those who knew him better than I did are best placed to tell how serious he was in this discounting of himself and of his times; for myself, I remember on more than one occasion catching him at it and getting, in return for my raised sceptical eyebrow, a broad and good-humoured hooded wink from that fierce eye of his.

He weathered the storm that greeted his Butcher’s Dozen, at least in public, with great calm; but the after-echoes of that rage against great injustice remained as an undercurrent in the best of the work that followed after. The mature work can best be read as a quarrel with the great injustice of death, and few poets in the English language have sustained so long an argument with that injustice, so prolonged an empathy with mortal creatures, as Kinsella did.

Peter Fallon
I first met Tom Kinsella in the spring of 1972. I was 20 or 21 and he was, what?, mid-40s. We'd agreed that I'd publish in a limited edition a broadside of his poem, Ely Place. We met so that he could sign the 50 handprinted copies. A serious man, I thought. It took years for me to recognise a lighter side.

In 1981, in collaboration with The Deerfield Press of Massachusetts, The Gallery Press published One Fond Embrace, again in a limited handprinted edition. He signed them before a dinner in Deerfield. In the intervening years I read all of his work and learned that his focus, his dedication to his work was an example.
I wouldn't pretend that we were close friends but our exchanges and meetings – in Dublin or in the US – were always warm, more than cordial. I think that it helped that he knew of my support for two of the poets he held in high regard, Michael Hartnett and Derek Mahon. (And, later, his old sparring partner, John Montague.)

When Derek Mahon and I were invited by Penguin to edit an anthology of contemporary poetry we led with poems by Thomas Kinsella – such was our admiration – and included more of them than by any other poet.

Ely Place includes the lines –

A few beginnings, a few
tentative tired endings over
and over...

They might speak for us all. Again, an example.
May he rest in peace.