‘Let the Fall begin’: Thomas Kinsella's European dimension

Abstract

This paper will explore the European dimension to Thomas Kinsella's work, in particular the Germanic influences: Goethe, Thomas Mann, Rilke, Mahler, and Carl Jung; as well as the influence of François Villon and Teilhard de Chardin. I will show how these influences inform Kinsella's attempt to forge an alternative to the ‘classicist’ aesthetic of his poetry of the 1950s. The essay has two purposes: firstly, to outline the under-acknowledged European aspect of Kinsella's development, and secondly to show briefly how Kinsella's aesthetic trajectory and the concerns underpinning his poetry have correspondences with the work of his European near-contemporary Czeslaw Milosz.

Keywords:

• Kinsella
• poetry
• European dimension
• German influence
• aesthetic development

Acknowledgements

Parts of this essay are adapted from The Sea of Disappointment: Thomas Kinsella's Pursuit of the Real (UCD Press, 2008).

Notes

 1. Kinsella, review of Urfaust, 19.

 2. Fitzsimons, ‘An Interview with Thomas Kinsella’, 90.

 3. Fitzsimons, ‘An Interview with Thomas Kinsella’., 91.

 4. Kinsella Papers, Emory University, box 12, folder 35.

 5. Thomas Kinsella, letter to author, 28 August 2003.

 6. Mann, Death in Venice, 147. For the identification between Kinsella and Tonio Kröger see ‘Brothers in the Craft’: ‘Tonio Kroeger, malodorous, prowled Inchicore’ (From Centre City, 19). See also Tubridy, Thomas Kinsella, 181; John, 252.

 7. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, 126.

 8. ‘the phallus, … working in darkness, begets a living being; and the key unlocks the mysterious forbidden door behind which some wonderful thing awaits discovery’ (Jung, Symbols of Transformation, 124).

 9. Kinsella Papers, box 3, folder 3. Subsequent quotations of the poem come from this box and folder.

10. Kinsella Papers, box 3, folder 3. Subsequent quotations of the poem come from this box and folder.

11. For a suggestive explication of the stanza in ‘Interlude: Time's Mischief’ (in Moralities ) from which this line comes, see Heaney, ‘Cornucopia and Empty Shell’, 57–9; and Heaney, Finders Keepers, 240–1.

12. See Kinsella, ‘Major American Poet’; and Kinsella, ‘The Hundred Cantos of Ezra Pound’. These reviews are interesting for the light they throw on Kinsella's ambitions for his own poetry. Kinsella expressed admiration for Stevens's ‘disturbingly precise sensibility, as fit to paint a shading of light or colour as to sculpt an idea’. His review emphasises the idea that ‘good poems […] do not ignore the intellect’, but also that Stevens's poems ‘see things whole – as they are – and not with the intellectual faculty, which would see things as they “ought to be”’. Good poems, Kinsella says, ‘direct their effect towards […] the whole mind and not to one part only’. The review of Pound provides an intriguing early insight into Kinsella's thoughts on waste, and his interest in a poetry that goes beyond the confines of ‘the lovely short poem’: ‘believers in Mr. Pound's method are tired of the view that the cantos consist of a series of lovely short poems embedded in a waste of poetical and syntactical error. But their counter-praise seems as extravagant as that view is stupid’. Kinsella's first visit to America occurred in 1963, on an exchange scholarship visiting and lecturing at ‘centres concerned with poetry’, including Harvard, Berkeley, the University of Washington, and the University of Chicago. Kinsella Papers, box 71, folder 20.

13. O'Driscoll, ‘Interview with Thomas Kinsella’, 60.

14. Villon, Selected Poems, 41. Pound adapted Villon's opening line in the ‘E.P. Ode Pour L'Election De Son Sepulchre’ section of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: ‘Unaffected by the “march of events”, / He passed from men's memory in l'an trentuniesme / De son eage’ (Pound, Collected Shorter Poems, 187).

15. The refrain is also used in Villon's ‘Le Lais’ [The Legacy] which Kinsella quotes from in ‘Time and the Poet’ (718). See Villon, Selected Poems, 26–8.

16. Kinsella, ‘Time and the Poet’, 718. The poem that Kinsella is referring to is ‘Ballade: Des Dames du Temps Jadis’, the famous refrain of which can be rendered into English as ‘Where are the snows of yesteryear?’.

17. Kinsella, ‘Time and the Poet’, 717; parentheses in original.

18. Kinsella, ‘Time and the Poet’, 717; parentheses in original, 718.

19. Kinsella Papers, box 3, folder 42.

20. Haffenden, ‘Thomas Kinsella’, 100. Asked whether he regretted the loss of the religious framework, Kinsella replied: ‘No, the supports that one might think of finding in organized religion I found elsewhere.’

21. Kinsella Papers, box 4, folder 10.

22. Beckett, ‘The Capital of the Ruins’, in As the Story was Told, 27–8; written for a Radio Éireann broadcast in June 1946. Beckett worked as an interpreter and store keeper from August 1945 to January 1946. See also Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 345–51.

23. Driver, Interview with Samuel Beckett, 218. Beckett's words were reconstructed from notes that Driver made shortly after his conversation with Beckett in 1961.

24. Driver, Interview with Samuel Beckett, 218. Beckett's words were reconstructed from notes that Driver made shortly after his conversation with Beckett in 1961, 218.

25. Kinsella reviewed, and praised, Bishop's Poems in Irish Writing 36 (late Autumn 1956). In the review he agrees with the writer in the New York Sunday Herald Tribune who believed, Kinsella says, that some of Bishop's poems would ‘become a permanent part of the poetry of our time’ (186).

26. Kinsella Papers, box 5, folder 1.

27. Bishop, Complete Poems, 64.

28. Kinsella, ‘Poetry since Yeats’, 109.

29. Kinsella, ‘Poetry since Yeats’, 109

30. Beckett, ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, 70.

31. Kinsella, ‘Poetry since Yeats’, 109.

32. Kinsella, ‘Poetry since Yeats’, 109

33. Kinsella, ‘Poetry since Yeats’, 108.

34. Deane, Celtic Revivals, 139.

35. Kinsella Papers, box 71, folder 13.

36. Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 78.

37. Kinsella Papers, box 71, folder 13.

38. Kinsella Papers, box 71, folder; Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 77.

39. Kinsella Papers, box 71, folder 13.

40. Kinsella Papers, box 71, folder

41. Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 69.

42. Goethe, Faust Parts 1 and 2, 167.

43. Kinsella, ‘Ancient Myth and Poetry’, 10; Kinsella's emphasis.

44. Kinsella, ‘Ancient Myth and Poetry’, 10; Kinsella's emphasis The consistency and sustaining longevity of the ideas that Kinsella developed in the late 1960s can be illustrated with reference to the idea of communication he expressed at the 1973 Montreal panel discussion. In an interview with the present author in 2004 Kinsella said: ‘The embodiment [of poetic material] needs to stand by itself, with the significant contents functioning in detail and form so that a reader can repeat the experience’ (Fitzsimons, ‘Interview’, 80).

45. ‘Faust gets a little key from Mephisto. It glows in his hand. He follows it down to the Mothers, to desolate loneliness. He feels appalled at the prospect/visit, but recognises that to feel appalled is the greatest gift of man (!) (he feels in his core, immensity.) He goes from created things into the realm of forms: drifting clouds of energy. Down to a glowing tripod (make it floating, or a monopod?)[.] The Mothers cannot see him: they are wreathed with all floating forms of what may be & see only shadows[.] He touches the tripod with the key & it comes with him (the Prize) back to the Hall where he will summon Paris and Helen from it’ (Kinsella Papers, box 10, folder 16).

46. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, 205.

47. Kinsella Papers, box 5, folder 29.

48. Jacobi, The Psychology of C.G. Jung, 113.

49. Jacobi, The Psychology of C.G. Jung, 112. Kinsella's notes on the shadow elaborate on this passage from Jacobi: ‘my dark side, wh. [which] I reject … / it is in opposition to my conscious principles, or attitudes/(wicked meanness, / hypocrisy / scrupulous polishing of the shallow, the empty / [my own repressed tendencies] / [– barring the way to the creative depths’ (Kinsella Papers, box 10, folder 21).

50. Jacobi, The Psychology of C.G. Jung, 110.

51. Kinsella Papers, box 10, folder 21.

52. Jacobi, The Psychology of C.G. Jung, 18. Kinsella quotes these lines in box 10, folder 21, a page on which he charts his own personality, ‘(me), (if normal)’, in Jungian terms.

53. Kinsella Papers, box 10, folder 21.

54. Kinsella Papers, box 10, folder 17.

55. Kinsella Papers, box 10, folder 16.

56. Kinsella Papers, box 10, folder 16 Kinsella's notes are from Louis MacNeice's 1949 translation of Faust Parts 1 and 2, 237.

57. Faust says ‘My welfare rests upon no rigid plan, / To feel appalled is the greatest gift of man; / Whatever the world impose as penalty, / His core is moved to feel immensity’ (Faust Parts 1 and 2, 168).

58. Kinsella Papers, box 10, folder 16.

59. Jung, ‘Approaching the Unconscious’, in Man and His Symbols, 90.

60. Kinsella Papers, box 10, folder 17.

61. Jacobi, The Psychology of C.G. Jung, 123. Jacobi sees Goethe's Faust as the quintessential imaginative expression of this process: ‘In the first half Gretchen carries the projection of Faust's anima. But the tragic end of this relationship compels him to withdraw the projection from the outside world and to seek this part of his psyche in himself. He finds it in another world, in the “underworld” of his unconscious, symbolized by Helen of Troy. The second part of Faust portrays an individuation process with all its archetypal figures; Helen is the typical anima figure, Faust's soul-image’ (Jacobi, The Psychology of C.G. Jung, 124).

62. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, 204–6. The speaker's ‘dive’ or ‘drop’ is also reminiscent of Jung's description of his own discovery of the inner world: ‘It was during the Advent of the year 1913 – December 12, to be exact – that I resolved upon the decisive step. I was sitting at my desk once more, thinking over my fears. Then I let myself drop. Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave way beneath my feet, and I plunged down into the dark depths.’ On his descent Jung encounters a ‘black scarab’, and recognises that his vision is a ‘hero and solar myth, a drama of death and renewal, the rebirth symbolized by the Egyptian scarab’ (Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 179). The speaker in ‘Hen Woman’ also encounters the scarab beetle.

63. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 181.

64. Boland, ‘The New Kinsella’.

65. Boland, ‘The New Kinsella’

66. Boland mistakenly says the poem comes from Downstream .

67. Kinsella Papers, box 9, folder 16.

68. Kinsella Papers, box 20, folder 12.

69. Kinsella Papers, box 18, folder 8.

70. Recall the lines ‘We fly into our risk, the spurious’ (AS, 29), and ‘I nonetheless inflict, endure, / Tedium, intracordal hurt’ (AS, 31).

71. Milosz, The Witness of Poetry, 29, which collected the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures that Milosz delivered at Harvard University in 1981–82. Milosz's discussion of the term ‘Movement’ also offers an insight into the philosophical orientation Kinsella displays in the Peppercanister poems: ‘It is worth noting that it is not the word Progress but Movement (capitalized) that is used, and this has manifold implications, for Progress denotes a linear ascension while Movement stresses incessant change and a dialectical play of opposites’ (35).

72. Milosz, The Witness of Poetry, 35.