The dissertation provides a survey of poetry in largely critically neglected decades of Irish literature, arguing that the poetry of Denis Devlin, Thomas MacGreevy, Samuel Beckett, Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, and Blanaid Salkeld represents a crucial phase in the development of Irish poetry. In the first three chapters I argue that Denis Devlin, Thomas MacGreevy, and Samuel Beckett develop a uniquely Irish form of modernism that sits uneasily with both Irish and Continental traditions, examines the horrors of modern war, and in the case of Beckett, proposes a form of humanism based on the physiology of the body that radically departs from Enlightenment models. The Kavanagh chapter examines his reclamation and reformation of the Irish bardic tradition of pastoral dystopianism and Kavanagh’s attempts at a new poetic based in anti-Pauline, post-institutionalized Christianity. The fifth chapter explores Clarke’s reanimation of technical aspects of pre-eighteenth-century Irish poetry and, despite his public anti-Yeatsian statements, argues that his poetry both carries on and develops the Revivalist project. The Salkeld chapter proposes that Irish feminism operates in the poetry of this period in ways that both undermine and support the projects of Salkeld’s male counterparts.