By now there is an accomplished body of Irish poetry written after Yeats, but until recently, it was obligatory that contemporary Irish poets?and critics well?cast a cold eye on the Revival in order to go forward creatively. As a result, if Padraic Colum (1881-1972) is mentioned at all these days, it is often part of a collective list concluding with the deadly usage al. Anthony Bradley, for in stance, in his introduction to Contemporary Irish Poetry (1980), refers to the Re vival poets?JE, Douglas Hyde, Katherine Tynan, ER.Higgins, Lady Gregory, James Stephens, Padraic Colum, et aV?and maintains that they have by now as sumed, for the most part, a historical opposed to a literary significance. Bradley goes on to note that the poetry in his anthology is almost invariably more moving and intelligent in the way it deals with human experience, more complex and accomplished in its art... than that written by the Revival poets.1 We might grant that point without, however, going along with Colum's being so casually dismissed a merely representative figure. This is a poet, after all, the voltage of whose early work Ezra Pound remarked in Pisan Canto LXXX.2 Most of the poems in Wild Earth (1916)?the likes of Beggar's Child, Across the Door, and A Poor Scholar of the Forties?call for no apologies today, some ninety years after their publication. The dark enchant ment of She Moved Through the Fair, another poem from that collection, has made it a standard lyric in the Irish musical canon, one still being recorded by such contemporary artists Van Morrison and Mary Black. Sin?ad O'Connor's version recently served the theme song for the film Michael Collins. It is true that most of Colum's work reflects an Ireland now largely passed, but surely there is another kind of significance, and even contemporary edge, to the often haunting, magic-realistic tenor of his best poetry. The pastoral erotics of Branding the Foals, for example, remain fresh: