This is a career-spanning selection of the essays and reviews of one of the greatest living Irish poets. This book makes widely available for the first time several key works in modern Irish literature, such as Kinsella's classic essay on the Gaelic poetry tradition. Thomas Kinsella was recently awarded the Freedom of Dublin City, an accolade given to a select few that has included John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela and Mother Theresa.This title contains essays on W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Austin Clarke, Louis le Brocquy and Sean O Riada. Also included are Kinsella's insightful discussions of his own poetry, some of them previously unpublished. Thomas Kinsella's career as an astute literary reviewer is reflected in assessments of work by W.H. Auden, Donald Davie, William Empson, Robert Graves, Louis MacNeice, and Marianne Moore, among others. Thomas Kinsella is widely known as the translator of "The Tain" and "Poems of the Dispossessed".