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 historical imaginary, ethical postures take on contemporary aesthetic forms: this is what in this article is termed their early modern poethics. These poetic speakers envision emigration and return migration, as well as internal migration, in the light cast by the haunting early modern paradigm provided by colonial writers or dispossessed and displaced “bardic” poets. The impulsion drawn from early-modern texts and contexts fashions creative practice, as Montague and Hartnett confront questions of language, communal and personal identity in later twentieth-century Ireland.