It has been said more than once that a writer's duty is to insult, rather than flatter. Yeats inclined to the view that whenever a country produced a man of genius, he was never like that country's idea of itself. Without a doubt, the literary movement now known as modernism consisted primarily in a revolt against all prevalent styles and a rebellion against official order; and yet, by its very innovative nature, it was precluded from establishing a fixed style of its own. ‘Modernism must struggle but never triumph,’ observed Irving Howe, ‘and in the end must struggle in order not to triumph.’

By the 1960s, this movement had come to an end, as society tamed and domesticated its wild bohemians, converting them from radical dissidents into slick entertainments. ‘The avant-garde writer’, bemoaned Howe, ‘must confront the one challenge for which he has not been prepared: the challenge of success … Meanwhile, the decor of yesterday is appropriated and slicked up; the noise of revolt magnified in a frolic of emptiness; and what little remains of modernism denied so much as the dignity of an opposition.’

Irish modernism had been largely an emigrant's affair – and those Gaelic writers who remained at home produced not a literature which peered into the abyss or fought the new establishment, but one which (in the view of Máirtín Ó Cadhain) was more suited to an audience of credulous schoolchildren and preconciliar nuns.