The various terms that have been applied, with whatever hesitation, to the alternative strain of Irish poetry on which this book focuses—experimental, modernist, late modernist, neo-avant-garde, avant-garde—might each seem to be qualified, if not directly contradicted by the appendage of the modifier “Irish.” We are accustomed to consider “modernism” a cosmopolitan or international venture, to the extent that to speak of “international style” almost immediately suggests that the style in question is modernist. The noun seems then to negate what the modifier “Irish” implies, a specific location or a sense of national identity that inflects modernism in ways that counteract its associations with territorial deracination, global flows of form as well as capital, and abstraction from the particularities of geography or culture. Franco Moretti's by now notorious, and certainly ill-timed comment that “Ulysses fully belongs to a critical turning point of international bourgeois culture—a status it would not have achieved in the investigation of Ireland's peripheral and backward form of capitalism” nicely encapsulated that critical prejudice. Though a generation of postcolonial Irish studies has challenged such judgments, emphasizing the precocious ways in which Ireland was drawn violently into colonial modernity and questioning the attribute of “peripherality” to any location in the system of capitalist relations, the critical assumption persists: the addition of the qualifier “Irish” (as with any other such adjective, whether “Indian,” “Brazilian,” or “African American”) inevitably suggests a qualified modernism, one whose relatively conservative, derivative, or “backward” forms fail to register the full impact of global modernity. The rubric “Irish Modernism” implies likewise the specific and local emplacement of a poetry while appealing to precisely what might be thought to displace and undo attachment to the local, that is, innovation or aesthetic experiment. Is it the case, then, that the poetic experiments of modernist form negate their identification as Irish? Such a question forces the further question as to how culture, local knowledge, or historical influences play into or against the constitutive autonomy of aesthetic form, or to what degree identity or place are constitutive of culture in ways that bar the universal reach of the aesthetic.