Both John Montague and Michael Hartnett resort to the image of the “road” at major junctures in their poetic development. In texts collected in The Rough Field (1972) for Montague, and in Hartnett’s trajectory from A Farewell to English (1975) to Inchicore Haiku (1985), they each mobilize an imaginary of migration drawn from the historical tumult, literary canons and migratory movements of Early Modern Ireland. Through this imaginary, ethical postures take on aesthetic forms: this is what I term their early modern poethics. Tempted by the pose as the “last bard of the O’Neills”, Montague traces a “road” from Garvaghey, Co. Tyrone, marked by transatlantic emigration and return migration, the haunting paradigm of which is constituted in plantation, expulsion and exile invoked through early modern colonial and anti-colonial texts, in English and in Irish. Edmund Spenser, John Davies amongst the ‘New English’, Shane and Hugh O’Neill from the Gaeil or Irish, are some of the early-modern figures through whom the contemporary poet-speaker’s historical consciousness is traced, as he considers Irish emigration, identity and voice in the twentieth century. Hartnett’s road is “not new”, but he laments the fact that it is little trodden, as a movement of internal migration enables his vision of contemporary reconnection with the tradition of the displaced and dispossessed Irish bards of the Irish and ‘Old English’ in Ireland (principally of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). These voices of forced migration resonate as Hartnett’s speaker opposes their fate and, histrionically, declares he is leaving behind him what he sees as the tradition and the language of the colonizer. For a decade after A Farewell, Hartnett indeed published original collections in Irish only. In order to track Hartnett’s internal migrations, I will focus on this departure from English towards the Gaelic bards and the reverse movement which marks the return from beyond the pale of language in Inchicore Haiku. The poethics in question displays conceptions of migration that encompass territory and language: the alienation, from both English and Irish, caused by the language-shift is charted through the various forms of migration mentioned. It could be said that both poets share in the undertaking, in Hartnett’s words, “to court the language of my people”. The impulsion drawn from early-modern texts and contexts fashions creative practice, be it the ragged discontinuities of poetic form in English for Montague, or Hartnett’s attempts to defamiliarize English poetics, through the Irish wellspring or the largely alien Japanese model of the haiku. The perspective adopted allows us to see, several years after the Dedalus Press published Writing Home: The ‘New Irish’ Poets (2019) and canonized that particular label, how poets of a previous generation used an imaginary of migration to grapple with the plural early-modern heritage of the Irish, ‘Old English’ and ‘New English’ (Gaeil/Éireannaigh, Sean-Ghaill, Nua-Ghaill).