Throughout this book, I have argued that we need to understand the poetry of the SoundEye poets—writers whose work has retained a sense of the ethical as well as aesthetic obligations that drove modernism and occasioned the apparent difficulty of its characteristic works—as a counterpoetics of modernity. Their commitment to finding poetic modes adequate to “the new things that have happened,” a commitment that, more than formal similarities or influences, forges their links to Samuel Beckett, is not in itself unprecedented in Irish writing. As I hope to have shown in the first part of the book, Irish poetry has always borne the marks of what Édouard Glissant calls a “forced poetics” that in turn shapes the conditions for any counterpoetics. Both Mangan and Yeats wrote in the shadow not only of language loss but also of the violence of a century of colonial modernization that sought quite expressly to destroy the Irish culture that had proven so recalcitrant to capitalist development. Like so many other colonized societies, Ireland long served as a kind of laboratory for the bureaucratic and institutional innovations that a colonial administration could impose and that forged the outlines of what the Frankfurt School would come to call administered society. As I have argued in the Introduction, Ireland's modernism was driven by the need to shape alternatives, both cultural institutions and forms of expression, to counter the imposition of British capitalist modernity. It is its virtue and not its shortcoming to be politicized through and through and to effect the integration of art and life in ways that sought to shape a different aesthetic sociality. If we have lost sight of this counterpoetic project of the Revival, after decades of a deliberately depoliticizing criticism, that is perhaps our loss rather than a failing of the work or of the Revival itself. This is not to say that the contemporary poets I have discussed see themselves as sharing that project or as working in continuity with the Revival in any direct way. On the contrary, the discontinuities that mark Irish poetic history, as I suggest in Chapter 1, are bridged neither by tradition nor by influence, but by a recurrent return to the impact of processes of modernization over which we have little control and which each time anew demand the reinvention of form in order to respond to the conditions of unfreedom they create.