The successive modernist moments that punctuate Irish literature, defined by their response to the colonial conditions of Ireland's modernity, are no new thing, even if they always seems to take new forms and require new declarations. Modernism in Irish poetry, a quality inseparable from its precocious experience of the violent and disruptive impact of modernization and the inroads of colonialism, cannot be understood apart from that history. The Irish poet Trevor Joyce concluded an essay on “alternative poetries” in Ireland with the following remarks:

The political echoes that reverberate in this poetic “declaration of independence,” with its insistence on the specificity and anti-hegemonic nature of an “alternative” Irish writing, are hardly accidental. They draw on a long and still fraught history, a history that distinguishes a specifically Irish modernist impetus from the mainstream of Anglo- American writing and, no less, from the “intimately oppressive” conformity of an Irish anti-modernism that has sought to establish its own untroubled backwater within that mainstream.

The traits of that alternative poetic modernism, from fragmentation to the suspicion of representation or of originality, can already be tracked in nineteenth-century work and respond to the rapid and unsettling effects of colonial modernity, from language loss to political violence. Irish poetry becomes modernist by virtue of its haunted awareness of loss: its inventiveness is driven not by poetic innovation for its own sake, but by the need to find formal means to engage with historical conditions that take from the writer the customary certainties of cultural continuity, autonomy, personal voice or even unmediated access to experience. To read Irish poetic work in this light is to move away from the divisions between traditionalism and modernism, mainstream and margins, formalism and experiment, that have tended to organize critical approaches to date, usually at the expense of the most vital and innovative work being written in Ireland.