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Thomas Kinsella: Jousting with Evil

2005; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 35; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/yes.2005.0038

2222-4289

Maurice Harmon,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Throughout his poetic career, Thomas Kinsella has been concerned with the presence of evil in the world, seen in man's capacity for cruelty and in the failure to respond creatively to pain, loss, and mutilation. The individual must engage with evil, absorb it and transmute it. His poems explore this engagement with increasing depth and magnitude, in individual poems, in sequences, in works of particular power such as 'Nightwalker', 'Notes from the Land of the Dead', the 'Wormwood' poems, and in 'Her Vertical Smile' where the force of Gustav Mahler's symphonies which move between creation and destruction is juxtaposed with Thomas Kinsella's corrective use of ironic counterpoint.