‘All is emptiness / and I must spin’: Thomas Kinsella and the romance of decay

Abstract

Writing on Kinsella's St Catherine's Clock, this essay addresses its author's cultural pessimism, analysing Kinsella's counterpointing of present and past, his use of allegory and his place in contemporary Irish poetry.

Keywords:

• Kinsella
• cultural pessimism
• allegory

Notes

 1. See Thomas Moore's songs ‘She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps’ and ‘Oh breathe not the name’, and Dion Boucicault's play Robert Emmet (1885).

 2. Joyce, Ulysses, 375.

 3. Kinsella, Collected Poems, 116. Hereafter CP.

 4. Redmond, ‘Making History’, 92.

 5. Tubridy, Thomas Kinsella, 154–65.

 6. T.D. Sullivan et al., Speeches from the Dock, 60.

 7. Deane, Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 933–5.

 8. Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition, 1–14.

 9. Hill, ‘Alienated Majesty’, in Collected Critical Writings, 518.

10. Joyce, Dubliners, 29–34.

11. Joyce, Dubliners, 175–225.