Thomas Kinsella

Civil servant turned poet and professor. The most formidable Irish poet of his generation: early formal work gave way to a difficult, Poundian, psychoanalytically-inflected later manner. His translation of The Táin (1969) and An Duanaire (with Seán Ó Tuama) reconnected English-language Ireland to the Gaelic past. Butcher's Dozen, on Bloody Sunday, was written in a week.