She remains a prolific poet and has been credited, along with Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máirtín Ó Direáin, with belatedly introducing literary modernism into Irish literature in the Irish-language in the years and decades following World War II. According to De Paor, "Máire Mhac an Tsaoi's poetry draws on the vernacular spoken by the native Irish speakers of the Munster Gaeltacht of West Kerry during the first half of the twentieth century. Formally, she draws on the song metres of the oral tradition and on older models from the earlier literary tradition, including the syllabic metres of the early modern period. The combination of spoken dialect enhanced by references and usages drawn from the older literature, and regular metrical forms contribute to a poetic voice that seems to with the accumulated authority of an unbroken tradition. In the later work, she explores looser verse forms but continues to draw on the remembered dialect of Dún Chaoin and on a scholarly knowledge of the older literature."