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Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography
This is the first paperback edition of Antoinette Quinn's acclaimed biography of Patrick Kavanagh, the most important Irish poet between the death of Yeats and the rise of Heaney. ""This is, quite simply, a magnificent work of love and scholarship and everybody with any interest in Ireland, and especially its poetry, must have a copy always to hand. The best biography I have read in years.""-John F. Deane, Irish Independent. ""This is a brave, strong book.""-John Montague, Irish Times. ""A strong and thoughtful work.""-Emanuel Keogh, Sunday Business Post. ""For anyone interested in Kavanagh, interested in the development of Irish poetry and the particularities of Irish culture, this book is, of course, an absolute must, but I would defy anyone to pick up this book and not find themselves immediately engrossed.""-Melissa Murray, Sunday Tribune. ""Antoinette Quinn has written a wonderful biography of this complex deeply researched, full of fascinating detail and entirely readable from beginning to end. This is the book we've been waiting for.""-Anthony Cronin, Sunday Independent.""...superbly researched and replete with arcane details of his life.""-Dan McCarthy, Irish Examiner.
- GenresBiographyNonfiction
560 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2001
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March 24, 2018
This is a first rate biography, though its 27 chapters do demand a significant effort from the reader. It sets out very coherently the way Kavanagh’s poetry developed and changed over his decades of writing. I read this alongside his Collected Poems. The following are some of my notes from the Kindle edition, but I lack the experience to be able to provide page numbers with each quote.
The Irish Statesman was his university, indoctrinating him through its editor’s articles and reviews in a particular aesthetic. Its influence was one that he was a long time shedding and perhaps never entirely shook off. ... The autodidact seeking a literary education in the pages of the Irish Statesman between 1925 and 1930 was indoctrinated in the poetics of late romanticism. ... It was a poetry at odds with the texture and idiom of contemporary life. Even the ‘Nocturne’ of a modernist like Thomas McGreevy conformed to this predilection for cosmic vagueness: ... The downside of Æ’s influence in the short term was that it led to an erasure of the local, the sensuous and the realist; in the long term it introduced a fondness for lofty abstractions to which he remained prone for most of his career.
In 1931 the Irish cultural nationalist writer and critic Daniel Corkery predicted that the Literary Revival generation of writers — W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge and Lady Gregory — who belonged to the Protestant ruling class, would be succeeded by an altogether different kind of Irish writer, one drawn from the majority Catholic population, an under-educated man of the people, a Mass-goer, one of the thousands who flocked to Gaelic football and hurling matches.
He [Kavenagh] conceived of the poet as a loner, avoiding all participation in communal sports and pastimes, a monk or ascetic repressing his sexuality for a higher spiritual good. ‘I am fenced/The light, the laugh, the dance against’, he wrote in ‘Poet’, and in one of his finest 1930s’ sonnets, ‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’, where he depicts himself as an Alexander Selkirk figure, a voluntary castaway for poetry’s sake,
Being a ‘bard’ did nothing to enhance his status in the community; on the contrary, fellow parishioners looked on his versifying as an affliction akin to madness: he was ‘touched’, not quite ‘right in the head’, ‘a bit odd of himself’, ‘not like another’. ‘God protect everybody’s rearing’, older people murmured, feeling sorry for Bridget.
It would be years before Carroll’s grim rural realism had much effect on his friend’s poetry, but it may have been as a consequence of their talks together that Kavanagh first began to conceive of himself as a writer with a social conscience and as the literate representative of his inarticulate countrymen.
Both the paganism and the piety were affectations; he was an intellectual poseur.
Generally he wrote as a romantic, more concerned to record his feelings and reactions than his visual observations. Yet, while almost every 1930s’ poem is a lyric, presented from a first-person, present-tense perspective, almost none achieves individuality. He purposely copies stances and styles that seem legitimately literary; he cultivates derivativeness.
Most of his 1930s’ poetry is either smug or whining, and it is always solemn.
By 1936 Kavanagh had achieved a literary reputation in Dublin far in excess of his slender output or his slight, undeveloped talent. This reputation, which preceded and anticipated his later achievement, was based on the vogue for peasantry in the wake of the Literary Revival.
For the most part the poems were the five-finger exercises of a poet whose models kept changing. Kavanagh’s ambition had outrun his achievement.
Praised and encouraged on all sides, he simply did not realise how weak much of his work actually was.
‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’, the best poem in Ploughman. Here for the first time Kavanagh is writing out of his ‘Monaghanness’ and revealing a unique personality in his poetry, as he ponders half-playfully, half-ruefully on the plight of being a young Inniskeen poet. He is allusive rather than derivative, humorously adapting a schoolbook poem (William Cowper’s ‘Verses Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk’) to his own particular situation. The language barrier between ‘the wink-and-elbow language’ of his neighbours and the ‘solemn talk’ of the poetic canon, far from intimidating him, is now one of his themes. He also displays an easy mastery of sonnet form, boldly disturbing its decorum from the outset by introducing Billy Brennan’s barn and bicycles. The reviewers who complained of Kavanagh’s imitativeness missed his most innovative poem; it was too new.
A significant new direction in some of the later 1936 and the 1937 poems is a conscious adoption of the role of peasant spokesman which points the way forward towards his anti-bourgeois and anti-establishment masterpiece, The Great Hunger. In ‘Peasant’ the poet is ‘the representative of those/Clay-faced sucklers of spade-handles’. ‘My People’ is a dialogue between a country poet and an urban stranger, in which metropolitan myths about peasant Ireland are harshly dismissed.
One of the book’s chief delights is hearing the authentic ‘voice of the people’ on every page. This larding of both commentary and conversation with local saws and sayings was not simply a natural consequence of growing up in or writing about Inniskeen. It was a legacy of the Literary Revival in general and of Synge’s drama in particular.
In reconstructing local life, his primary model was the fiction of William Carleton, the nineteenth-century Ulster short-story writer and novelist, whose work he had begun to revere. Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry showed him how to populate his narrative with a multitude of characters and make them live through speech.
Despite the modernist eruption of Eliot, Pound and Yeats into the tranquil English poetic scene, there was still a considerable vogue for this less flamboyantly intellectual and more technically conservative verse which Edward Marsh had begun marketing as ‘Georgian poetry’ in 1912. Georgian poetry was meditative, smooth, short, low-key, often rural in content, realist but avoiding messy particularities, focusing on genteel images which could double as generic symbols and evoke spiritually elevating reactions. Kavanagh’s brief, rhymed, decorous verse on rural subjects was exactly the kind of poetry of which Gawsworth approved.
A note Kavanagh appended to this last collection in 1949 reads, ‘All unpub. all rightly so.’ The survival of such a vast quantity of low-grade early verse means that to bring out a Complete Poems that was really complete would do Kavanagh’s reputation no service.
The ballad, which categorised Fallon, Clarke and his own friend and sponsor, Higgins, as mere ‘highbrow grammarians’ rather than poets, anticipates his later sustained assault on Dublin’s artistic establishment as represented by the Palace Bar habitués. For him, this coterie came to symbolise Dublin’s smug, self-congratulatory, post-Revival culture, parasitic on the real achievements of the dead Yeats, talking about art rather than achieving it.
He was among those present at T. S. Eliot’s Memorial Lecture on W. B. Yeats in the Abbey Theatre on Sunday, 30 June, when Eliot in a slow, hesitating yet clear voice spoke about Yeats’s poetry for over an hour without ever becoming totally enthusiastic. This cool, critical appraisal may have planted his own first doubts about Yeats’s greatness.
His career as an enfant terrible, the scourge of respectable public institutions, was inaugurated with the Walsh review. This capacity for iconoclasm made him an instant firm favourite with university students.
O’Faoláin’s key argument was that the Literary Revival was the product of a nation in the process of becoming, and that the new Free State demanded a radically new and different literature. This new literature must represent Free State Ireland in all its facets: it must be primarily documentary or socio-analytical in focus, pluralist in political and religious matters, realist in technique. From late 1939 and throughout 1940 Kavanagh listened avidly as the two Cork writers hammered out the basic tenets of their programme for the future of Irish literature, which they would expound in print in the first issue of the influential new journal, The Bell, in October 1940.
The distinguishing characteristic of contemporary Irish writing, for O’Faoláin in 1940, was a shift from totalising national symbolism to local realism. His advice to intending contributors was to avoid abstraction and describe what they knew: Write about your gateway, your well-field, your street-corner, your girl, your boat-slip, pubs, books, pictures, dogs, horses, river, tractor, anything at all that has a hold on you.
Far from being apologetic about the indecorousness of his rural subject matter, he had begun to flaunt it and defy the canons of pastoral orthodoxy. It is not the roses on the orchard wall but the ‘lime and copper smell of the spraying barrels’ and the blossoming potato plants that cast a potent spell in ‘Spraying the Potatoes’. In ‘Threshing Morning’, a young love-struck farmer, rhapsodising on his life, is exhilarated by such trivial and inelegant incidents as shovelling up eels or dodging wasp stings.
This lengthy poem reveals how he had to rethink radically and fundamentally his conception of what was legitimate or permissible in poetry. It records a quarrel with himself between the material that affection, understanding and compassion dictated and the safe, decorous subjects and stances that existing Irish literature favoured.
He was floundering in the early 1940s, anxious to do whatever it took to be a successful writer, yet deeply unsure as to what that was. Over ten years would elapse before he would confidently pronounce on the primacy of the local and the parochial in art.
Because the two other lengthy narratives on which he was working in the run-up to and at the same time as he was writing it remained unpublished, The Great Hunger seems to represent a sudden and abrupt change of thematic and formal direction, whereas it was in fact the culminating expression of a process of literary disenchantment with his small-farm milieu and the most successful of a number of experiments with dramatising a repudiation of Irish country life in fictional form.
By 1949 he was already disowning the sociological function of literature, but his most notorious public recantation was in the preface to his Collected Poems in 1964: The Great Hunger is concerned with the woes of the poor. A true poet is selfish and implacable. A poet merely states the position and does not care whether his words change anything or not.
From 1942 Catholicism would be integral to Kavanagh’s literary radicalism, his cultural self-differentiation from and opposition to the Protestant (or non-Catholic) writers of the Literary Revival.
He was a practical as well as a practising Catholic, not one to hide his halo under a bushel.
While not ostensibly a journey into his personal and poetic psyche, like Seamus Heaney’s Station Island, Lough Derg is nevertheless at times either covertly or overtly confessional. Unlike Heaney, Kavanagh is not artistically in control of his introspective processes; he appears to be struggling with his own partialities and preconceptions in order to achieve some semblance of objectivity and, in the concluding stages, enthusiasm.
He would always distrust newspaper definitions of the important: ‘the day’s loud lying’.
He no longer equates poetry with profundity, with the tragic destiny or the epiphanic moment. He is experimenting with ‘light verses for the times that are in it’, verse that is ‘an entertainment only’. His poetry is adapting itself, however superficially and ephemerally, to his urban circumstances, not stagnating in the countryside.
In the course of these reviews he mounted his first full frontal attack on the Literary Revival writers, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge, on grounds of creed and class, displaying a blatant sectarianism he was generally careful to conceal in public. ‘The Anglo-Irish’ are presented as ‘lookers-on’, not ‘part of the national consciousness’, bypassing Rome and so missing the ‘soul of Ireland’.
He is deliberately decentralising Revival literature to make space for another kind of writing, a Catholic narrative deriving from the experience of the majority. ‘A people raises up a poet out of its silent necessity’, as he has been raised. He is here manoeuvring himself into the position of poet laureate or national bard.
The country was a good place to write about but a dreadful place to live in. Had he really wanted to resume the life of farmer-poet, he could have done so during one of the long stretches when he was unemployed. The truth was that he would rather starve in Dublin than live in mentally stultifying comfort in Inniskeen.
‘It is only in normality that you can have originality’ was to be one of Kavanagh’s axioms
Tarry Flynn captures the comedy of normal local life and local talk, the unending entertainment that neighbours provide for one another as they go about their daily round of point-scoring, begrudgery and malicious innuendo.
One of the consequences of redrafting his novel for the Pilot Press was that it led Kavanagh to formalise and formulate his changing views on literature: Tarry Flynn is packed with aesthetic pronouncements. In particular, its narrator dwells on the importance of affection for one’s material or a comic detachment from it, as opposed to socio-critical engagement in art. Ironically, Tarry Flynn ushered in a period when the theme and thrust of most of Kavanagh’s writing would be cultural and literary criticism. Using The Bell as his main base of operations, he now set himself up as an authoritative cultural critic. An aggressive, unmannerly period ensued as he wrenched himself free from both his rural and his ethnic matrix.
The Pearl Bar crowd, as caricatured in ‘The Paddiad’, could be characterised as Kavanagh’s ‘other’, an assemblage of all the aspects of contemporary Irish writing he most detested. He defines himself by opposition; he is the unwanted outsider, Paddy Conscience, a composite of Yeats, Sean O’Casey, James Joyce and himself, a starving and martyred poet ‘ready to die of hunger’ in the cause of art, though not, it seems, of thirst. Whereas the followers of Mediocrity are smooth-spoken, well-dressed bourgeois types, Paddy Conscience is a dirty, down-at-heel drunk, ‘condemnatory and uncivil’, bothering Ireland ‘with muck and anger’. In his satires on literary Dublin, Kavanagh is always his own hero.
From now on he spent less and less time with his contemporaries and was generally to be found in the company of much younger writers and artists. Brendan Behan dubbed him ‘the king of the kids’.
With the encouragement of witty young Envoy friends like Cronin, he lightened up and ceased to pose as the boringly earnest personification of unworldly virtue in his verse.
Because it involved so much self-exposure both of his unsaintly character and his reverence for the poet in himself, this was a very daring poetry to publish in a small gossipy society like Dublin. It could probably only be done with the support of a coterie of friends, who relished his doings and sayings and encouraged him to reveal the range of his character and personality and not to limit himself to the roles of victim or morally outraged prig.
The contrast between the countryman of ‘Adventure’ and the poet-narrator of ‘Bank Holiday’ (originally ‘Testament’) and ‘Auditors In’ demonstrates his discovery of the self as subject rather than mere moral exemplar.
‘Epic’ is his finest and most subtle defence of old-fashioned rural subject matter: I inclined To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind He said: I made the Iliad from such A local row. Gods make their own importance.
...his views on parochialism and provincialism, which occurred in the editorial of 24 May: Parochialism and provincialism are direct opposites. The provincial has no mind of his own; he does not trust what his eyes see until he has heard what the metropolis — towards which his eyes are turned — has to say on any subject . . . The parochial mentality on the other hand is never in any doubt about the social and artistic validity of his parish. All great civilisations are based on parochialism — Greek, Israelite, English.
Though his late 1950s’ poetry does not make a complete thematic or stylistic break with his previous verse, it does represent a fresh departure. The outlook and mood are different. These ‘noo pomes’ are utterly celebratory.
Most of the ‘noo pomes’ are poems about poetry: credos, manifestos, poetic stocktakings, announcements of future schemes and programmes, glimpses of ‘the Muse at her toilet’. Such pronouncements on poetry are frequently presented in an anti-literary or demotic style: ‘Therefore I say to hell/With all reasonable/ Poems .
Yet for all its apparent casualness this verse has ‘a shapely form’: many of the lyrics are sonnets; the remainder are, for the most part, written in couplets. Their air of impromptu utterance and unrehearsed immediacy is the product of an art that conceals art.
Whereas many middle-class folk regarded Kavanagh superciliously as a mere peasant or bogman, in his own estimation he was an aristocrat, a member of an exclusive caste. His contempt for the cultural aspirations of helots is stated in no uncertain terms in ‘Art for Ballydehob’, an essay in which he refers to his Kilkenny visit: These people are not of the slightest account in the business of art. They are, in fact, its enemies, barbarians who should be treated as such and kept sawing wood and drawing water as happened in ancient Athens. To consider such people is to drag down the glorious individual spirit from the slopes of Parnassus . . .
Had Blackburn read ‘From Monaghan to the Grand Canal’, a manifesto essay published in Studies that spring, he would have had a better insight into Kavanagh’s opposition to the cult of place and ethnicity in literature. Post-Revival literature, the essay argues, was largely predicated on the significance of place, particularly rural places, ‘roots in the soil’, and this promotion of the regional and local was an offshoot of literary nationalism, the preoccupation with a spiritual entity called Ireland. The principal revelation that had occurred to Kavanagh during his period of psychic and aesthetic renewal on the bank of the Grand Canal in July 1955 was that Real roots lie in our capacity for love and its abandon. The material itself has no special value; it is what our imagination and our love does to it.
Asked what he considered his best work, for instance, he replied, ‘I don’t like anything of my own. I don’t like anything.’ And in response to the question, ‘What have been your most fruitful years?’ he answered, ‘All of them have been unfruitful and atrocious.’ Yet, almost in spite of himself, the interview reveals his humility as a poet. He is still learning how to write, though ‘in the last few years’ he has ‘got an idea of how it’s done’. Suffering and misfortune must be transmuted into ‘something gay and happy’: ‘to achieve lightness, that’s the hard work’.
Maurice Henry recalls that the theory of poetry he propounded in his cups was ‘Open your fuckin’ eyes and observe.’
The Irish Statesman was his university, indoctrinating him through its editor’s articles and reviews in a particular aesthetic. Its influence was one that he was a long time shedding and perhaps never entirely shook off. ... The autodidact seeking a literary education in the pages of the Irish Statesman between 1925 and 1930 was indoctrinated in the poetics of late romanticism. ... It was a poetry at odds with the texture and idiom of contemporary life. Even the ‘Nocturne’ of a modernist like Thomas McGreevy conformed to this predilection for cosmic vagueness: ... The downside of Æ’s influence in the short term was that it led to an erasure of the local, the sensuous and the realist; in the long term it introduced a fondness for lofty abstractions to which he remained prone for most of his career.
In 1931 the Irish cultural nationalist writer and critic Daniel Corkery predicted that the Literary Revival generation of writers — W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge and Lady Gregory — who belonged to the Protestant ruling class, would be succeeded by an altogether different kind of Irish writer, one drawn from the majority Catholic population, an under-educated man of the people, a Mass-goer, one of the thousands who flocked to Gaelic football and hurling matches.
He [Kavenagh] conceived of the poet as a loner, avoiding all participation in communal sports and pastimes, a monk or ascetic repressing his sexuality for a higher spiritual good. ‘I am fenced/The light, the laugh, the dance against’, he wrote in ‘Poet’, and in one of his finest 1930s’ sonnets, ‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’, where he depicts himself as an Alexander Selkirk figure, a voluntary castaway for poetry’s sake,
Being a ‘bard’ did nothing to enhance his status in the community; on the contrary, fellow parishioners looked on his versifying as an affliction akin to madness: he was ‘touched’, not quite ‘right in the head’, ‘a bit odd of himself’, ‘not like another’. ‘God protect everybody’s rearing’, older people murmured, feeling sorry for Bridget.
It would be years before Carroll’s grim rural realism had much effect on his friend’s poetry, but it may have been as a consequence of their talks together that Kavanagh first began to conceive of himself as a writer with a social conscience and as the literate representative of his inarticulate countrymen.
Both the paganism and the piety were affectations; he was an intellectual poseur.
Generally he wrote as a romantic, more concerned to record his feelings and reactions than his visual observations. Yet, while almost every 1930s’ poem is a lyric, presented from a first-person, present-tense perspective, almost none achieves individuality. He purposely copies stances and styles that seem legitimately literary; he cultivates derivativeness.
Most of his 1930s’ poetry is either smug or whining, and it is always solemn.
By 1936 Kavanagh had achieved a literary reputation in Dublin far in excess of his slender output or his slight, undeveloped talent. This reputation, which preceded and anticipated his later achievement, was based on the vogue for peasantry in the wake of the Literary Revival.
For the most part the poems were the five-finger exercises of a poet whose models kept changing. Kavanagh’s ambition had outrun his achievement.
Praised and encouraged on all sides, he simply did not realise how weak much of his work actually was.
‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’, the best poem in Ploughman. Here for the first time Kavanagh is writing out of his ‘Monaghanness’ and revealing a unique personality in his poetry, as he ponders half-playfully, half-ruefully on the plight of being a young Inniskeen poet. He is allusive rather than derivative, humorously adapting a schoolbook poem (William Cowper’s ‘Verses Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk’) to his own particular situation. The language barrier between ‘the wink-and-elbow language’ of his neighbours and the ‘solemn talk’ of the poetic canon, far from intimidating him, is now one of his themes. He also displays an easy mastery of sonnet form, boldly disturbing its decorum from the outset by introducing Billy Brennan’s barn and bicycles. The reviewers who complained of Kavanagh’s imitativeness missed his most innovative poem; it was too new.
A significant new direction in some of the later 1936 and the 1937 poems is a conscious adoption of the role of peasant spokesman which points the way forward towards his anti-bourgeois and anti-establishment masterpiece, The Great Hunger. In ‘Peasant’ the poet is ‘the representative of those/Clay-faced sucklers of spade-handles’. ‘My People’ is a dialogue between a country poet and an urban stranger, in which metropolitan myths about peasant Ireland are harshly dismissed.
One of the book’s chief delights is hearing the authentic ‘voice of the people’ on every page. This larding of both commentary and conversation with local saws and sayings was not simply a natural consequence of growing up in or writing about Inniskeen. It was a legacy of the Literary Revival in general and of Synge’s drama in particular.
In reconstructing local life, his primary model was the fiction of William Carleton, the nineteenth-century Ulster short-story writer and novelist, whose work he had begun to revere. Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry showed him how to populate his narrative with a multitude of characters and make them live through speech.
Despite the modernist eruption of Eliot, Pound and Yeats into the tranquil English poetic scene, there was still a considerable vogue for this less flamboyantly intellectual and more technically conservative verse which Edward Marsh had begun marketing as ‘Georgian poetry’ in 1912. Georgian poetry was meditative, smooth, short, low-key, often rural in content, realist but avoiding messy particularities, focusing on genteel images which could double as generic symbols and evoke spiritually elevating reactions. Kavanagh’s brief, rhymed, decorous verse on rural subjects was exactly the kind of poetry of which Gawsworth approved.
A note Kavanagh appended to this last collection in 1949 reads, ‘All unpub. all rightly so.’ The survival of such a vast quantity of low-grade early verse means that to bring out a Complete Poems that was really complete would do Kavanagh’s reputation no service.
The ballad, which categorised Fallon, Clarke and his own friend and sponsor, Higgins, as mere ‘highbrow grammarians’ rather than poets, anticipates his later sustained assault on Dublin’s artistic establishment as represented by the Palace Bar habitués. For him, this coterie came to symbolise Dublin’s smug, self-congratulatory, post-Revival culture, parasitic on the real achievements of the dead Yeats, talking about art rather than achieving it.
He was among those present at T. S. Eliot’s Memorial Lecture on W. B. Yeats in the Abbey Theatre on Sunday, 30 June, when Eliot in a slow, hesitating yet clear voice spoke about Yeats’s poetry for over an hour without ever becoming totally enthusiastic. This cool, critical appraisal may have planted his own first doubts about Yeats’s greatness.
His career as an enfant terrible, the scourge of respectable public institutions, was inaugurated with the Walsh review. This capacity for iconoclasm made him an instant firm favourite with university students.
O’Faoláin’s key argument was that the Literary Revival was the product of a nation in the process of becoming, and that the new Free State demanded a radically new and different literature. This new literature must represent Free State Ireland in all its facets: it must be primarily documentary or socio-analytical in focus, pluralist in political and religious matters, realist in technique. From late 1939 and throughout 1940 Kavanagh listened avidly as the two Cork writers hammered out the basic tenets of their programme for the future of Irish literature, which they would expound in print in the first issue of the influential new journal, The Bell, in October 1940.
The distinguishing characteristic of contemporary Irish writing, for O’Faoláin in 1940, was a shift from totalising national symbolism to local realism. His advice to intending contributors was to avoid abstraction and describe what they knew: Write about your gateway, your well-field, your street-corner, your girl, your boat-slip, pubs, books, pictures, dogs, horses, river, tractor, anything at all that has a hold on you.
Far from being apologetic about the indecorousness of his rural subject matter, he had begun to flaunt it and defy the canons of pastoral orthodoxy. It is not the roses on the orchard wall but the ‘lime and copper smell of the spraying barrels’ and the blossoming potato plants that cast a potent spell in ‘Spraying the Potatoes’. In ‘Threshing Morning’, a young love-struck farmer, rhapsodising on his life, is exhilarated by such trivial and inelegant incidents as shovelling up eels or dodging wasp stings.
This lengthy poem reveals how he had to rethink radically and fundamentally his conception of what was legitimate or permissible in poetry. It records a quarrel with himself between the material that affection, understanding and compassion dictated and the safe, decorous subjects and stances that existing Irish literature favoured.
He was floundering in the early 1940s, anxious to do whatever it took to be a successful writer, yet deeply unsure as to what that was. Over ten years would elapse before he would confidently pronounce on the primacy of the local and the parochial in art.
Because the two other lengthy narratives on which he was working in the run-up to and at the same time as he was writing it remained unpublished, The Great Hunger seems to represent a sudden and abrupt change of thematic and formal direction, whereas it was in fact the culminating expression of a process of literary disenchantment with his small-farm milieu and the most successful of a number of experiments with dramatising a repudiation of Irish country life in fictional form.
By 1949 he was already disowning the sociological function of literature, but his most notorious public recantation was in the preface to his Collected Poems in 1964: The Great Hunger is concerned with the woes of the poor. A true poet is selfish and implacable. A poet merely states the position and does not care whether his words change anything or not.
From 1942 Catholicism would be integral to Kavanagh’s literary radicalism, his cultural self-differentiation from and opposition to the Protestant (or non-Catholic) writers of the Literary Revival.
He was a practical as well as a practising Catholic, not one to hide his halo under a bushel.
While not ostensibly a journey into his personal and poetic psyche, like Seamus Heaney’s Station Island, Lough Derg is nevertheless at times either covertly or overtly confessional. Unlike Heaney, Kavanagh is not artistically in control of his introspective processes; he appears to be struggling with his own partialities and preconceptions in order to achieve some semblance of objectivity and, in the concluding stages, enthusiasm.
He would always distrust newspaper definitions of the important: ‘the day’s loud lying’.
He no longer equates poetry with profundity, with the tragic destiny or the epiphanic moment. He is experimenting with ‘light verses for the times that are in it’, verse that is ‘an entertainment only’. His poetry is adapting itself, however superficially and ephemerally, to his urban circumstances, not stagnating in the countryside.
In the course of these reviews he mounted his first full frontal attack on the Literary Revival writers, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge, on grounds of creed and class, displaying a blatant sectarianism he was generally careful to conceal in public. ‘The Anglo-Irish’ are presented as ‘lookers-on’, not ‘part of the national consciousness’, bypassing Rome and so missing the ‘soul of Ireland’.
He is deliberately decentralising Revival literature to make space for another kind of writing, a Catholic narrative deriving from the experience of the majority. ‘A people raises up a poet out of its silent necessity’, as he has been raised. He is here manoeuvring himself into the position of poet laureate or national bard.
The country was a good place to write about but a dreadful place to live in. Had he really wanted to resume the life of farmer-poet, he could have done so during one of the long stretches when he was unemployed. The truth was that he would rather starve in Dublin than live in mentally stultifying comfort in Inniskeen.
‘It is only in normality that you can have originality’ was to be one of Kavanagh’s axioms
Tarry Flynn captures the comedy of normal local life and local talk, the unending entertainment that neighbours provide for one another as they go about their daily round of point-scoring, begrudgery and malicious innuendo.
One of the consequences of redrafting his novel for the Pilot Press was that it led Kavanagh to formalise and formulate his changing views on literature: Tarry Flynn is packed with aesthetic pronouncements. In particular, its narrator dwells on the importance of affection for one’s material or a comic detachment from it, as opposed to socio-critical engagement in art. Ironically, Tarry Flynn ushered in a period when the theme and thrust of most of Kavanagh’s writing would be cultural and literary criticism. Using The Bell as his main base of operations, he now set himself up as an authoritative cultural critic. An aggressive, unmannerly period ensued as he wrenched himself free from both his rural and his ethnic matrix.
The Pearl Bar crowd, as caricatured in ‘The Paddiad’, could be characterised as Kavanagh’s ‘other’, an assemblage of all the aspects of contemporary Irish writing he most detested. He defines himself by opposition; he is the unwanted outsider, Paddy Conscience, a composite of Yeats, Sean O’Casey, James Joyce and himself, a starving and martyred poet ‘ready to die of hunger’ in the cause of art, though not, it seems, of thirst. Whereas the followers of Mediocrity are smooth-spoken, well-dressed bourgeois types, Paddy Conscience is a dirty, down-at-heel drunk, ‘condemnatory and uncivil’, bothering Ireland ‘with muck and anger’. In his satires on literary Dublin, Kavanagh is always his own hero.
From now on he spent less and less time with his contemporaries and was generally to be found in the company of much younger writers and artists. Brendan Behan dubbed him ‘the king of the kids’.
With the encouragement of witty young Envoy friends like Cronin, he lightened up and ceased to pose as the boringly earnest personification of unworldly virtue in his verse.
Because it involved so much self-exposure both of his unsaintly character and his reverence for the poet in himself, this was a very daring poetry to publish in a small gossipy society like Dublin. It could probably only be done with the support of a coterie of friends, who relished his doings and sayings and encouraged him to reveal the range of his character and personality and not to limit himself to the roles of victim or morally outraged prig.
The contrast between the countryman of ‘Adventure’ and the poet-narrator of ‘Bank Holiday’ (originally ‘Testament’) and ‘Auditors In’ demonstrates his discovery of the self as subject rather than mere moral exemplar.
‘Epic’ is his finest and most subtle defence of old-fashioned rural subject matter: I inclined To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind He said: I made the Iliad from such A local row. Gods make their own importance.
...his views on parochialism and provincialism, which occurred in the editorial of 24 May: Parochialism and provincialism are direct opposites. The provincial has no mind of his own; he does not trust what his eyes see until he has heard what the metropolis — towards which his eyes are turned — has to say on any subject . . . The parochial mentality on the other hand is never in any doubt about the social and artistic validity of his parish. All great civilisations are based on parochialism — Greek, Israelite, English.
Though his late 1950s’ poetry does not make a complete thematic or stylistic break with his previous verse, it does represent a fresh departure. The outlook and mood are different. These ‘noo pomes’ are utterly celebratory.
Most of the ‘noo pomes’ are poems about poetry: credos, manifestos, poetic stocktakings, announcements of future schemes and programmes, glimpses of ‘the Muse at her toilet’. Such pronouncements on poetry are frequently presented in an anti-literary or demotic style: ‘Therefore I say to hell/With all reasonable/ Poems .
Yet for all its apparent casualness this verse has ‘a shapely form’: many of the lyrics are sonnets; the remainder are, for the most part, written in couplets. Their air of impromptu utterance and unrehearsed immediacy is the product of an art that conceals art.
Whereas many middle-class folk regarded Kavanagh superciliously as a mere peasant or bogman, in his own estimation he was an aristocrat, a member of an exclusive caste. His contempt for the cultural aspirations of helots is stated in no uncertain terms in ‘Art for Ballydehob’, an essay in which he refers to his Kilkenny visit: These people are not of the slightest account in the business of art. They are, in fact, its enemies, barbarians who should be treated as such and kept sawing wood and drawing water as happened in ancient Athens. To consider such people is to drag down the glorious individual spirit from the slopes of Parnassus . . .
Had Blackburn read ‘From Monaghan to the Grand Canal’, a manifesto essay published in Studies that spring, he would have had a better insight into Kavanagh’s opposition to the cult of place and ethnicity in literature. Post-Revival literature, the essay argues, was largely predicated on the significance of place, particularly rural places, ‘roots in the soil’, and this promotion of the regional and local was an offshoot of literary nationalism, the preoccupation with a spiritual entity called Ireland. The principal revelation that had occurred to Kavanagh during his period of psychic and aesthetic renewal on the bank of the Grand Canal in July 1955 was that Real roots lie in our capacity for love and its abandon. The material itself has no special value; it is what our imagination and our love does to it.
Asked what he considered his best work, for instance, he replied, ‘I don’t like anything of my own. I don’t like anything.’ And in response to the question, ‘What have been your most fruitful years?’ he answered, ‘All of them have been unfruitful and atrocious.’ Yet, almost in spite of himself, the interview reveals his humility as a poet. He is still learning how to write, though ‘in the last few years’ he has ‘got an idea of how it’s done’. Suffering and misfortune must be transmuted into ‘something gay and happy’: ‘to achieve lightness, that’s the hard work’.
Maurice Henry recalls that the theory of poetry he propounded in his cups was ‘Open your fuckin’ eyes and observe.’
April 21, 2020
I've always enjoyed the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh. He's from just a few miles up the road, amidst the rolling drumlins and stony grey soil of County Monaghan. I've his collected poems on the shelf, and like to occasionally dip into it. I worked in Dublin in the area most associated with him, around the Baggot Street/Pembroke Road area, and have spent many lunch times along the canal where there's a statue of him, observing the 'stilly greeny waters' in 'tremendous silence.'
I got this biography because I've always heard about the reputation of Kavanagh as a rough, uncouth sort of individual, and wanted to know how much of this public persona was true. And it turns out that indeed Kavanagh was a bit of rough, uncouth sort of individual. But he was also a damn fine poet, one of Ireland's greatest, and this biography examines both his life and his work in detail.
His formative years in Inniskeen are interesting, and you get a sense of how he was inspired by the world surrounding him. But what I particularly enjoyed were the parts concerning his life in Dublin, including his feud with Brendan Behan and his many falling outs. A friend could become a mortal enemy over the course of an evening in McDaids. He was savage with his insults and woe betide any stranger who approached him in the street. In his younger years he would become fixated with women and would wear them down by following them about town, a policy not always successful. 'Raglan road' was a result of one of these infatuations. He's constantly skint and lives a hand to mouth to existence at times, hawking himself around for the sake of a few pound. Drink and gambling begin to dominate his life. At times it seems sad that he resorted to this and didn't have more stability, but he was also his own worst enemy, squandering good will and money alike.
Throughout these escapades between Iniskeen, Dublin and London, his poetry shines through. The book does a great job of placing the genesis of his work in the context of his life. I got a greater appreciation of some of his lesser known poems and enjoyed reading about how his poetry changed over his lifetime.
This is a fascinating biography of a complicated, private individual. In one of his poems he invites the reader to go to Dublin town in one hundred years and inquire after him on Baggot street, see what he was like to know. There mightn't be too many about who will, but this book, along with his poetry of course, is as close as you'll get to the man.
I got this biography because I've always heard about the reputation of Kavanagh as a rough, uncouth sort of individual, and wanted to know how much of this public persona was true. And it turns out that indeed Kavanagh was a bit of rough, uncouth sort of individual. But he was also a damn fine poet, one of Ireland's greatest, and this biography examines both his life and his work in detail.
His formative years in Inniskeen are interesting, and you get a sense of how he was inspired by the world surrounding him. But what I particularly enjoyed were the parts concerning his life in Dublin, including his feud with Brendan Behan and his many falling outs. A friend could become a mortal enemy over the course of an evening in McDaids. He was savage with his insults and woe betide any stranger who approached him in the street. In his younger years he would become fixated with women and would wear them down by following them about town, a policy not always successful. 'Raglan road' was a result of one of these infatuations. He's constantly skint and lives a hand to mouth to existence at times, hawking himself around for the sake of a few pound. Drink and gambling begin to dominate his life. At times it seems sad that he resorted to this and didn't have more stability, but he was also his own worst enemy, squandering good will and money alike.
Throughout these escapades between Iniskeen, Dublin and London, his poetry shines through. The book does a great job of placing the genesis of his work in the context of his life. I got a greater appreciation of some of his lesser known poems and enjoyed reading about how his poetry changed over his lifetime.
This is a fascinating biography of a complicated, private individual. In one of his poems he invites the reader to go to Dublin town in one hundred years and inquire after him on Baggot street, see what he was like to know. There mightn't be too many about who will, but this book, along with his poetry of course, is as close as you'll get to the man.
April 9, 2017
A huge, boiling biography, showing Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh warts and all. He really did lead an astonishing life, brilliant on paper...but I don't think I would have enjoyed being his friend...!
January 14, 2024
Comprehensive and well written biography of an Irish poet who is sometimes bypassed in the canon of Irish poet greats.
December 26, 2025
I would like to say this was an illuminating biography but that is not the case. if this was the true poet I found him to have few redeeming qualities including his poetry.
March 10, 2022
MARCH
36.
by Antoinette Quinn (no photo)Finish date: 08 March 2022
Genre: Biography
Rating: B
Review:
Bad news If you really want to enjoy this book…you’ll have to invest in a 2e book The Collected Poems of Patrick Kavanagh . There are so many reference to Kavanagh’s poetry you will have read both books simultaneously.
Bad news Life is hard and Kavanaugh was 50 yr. old and a middle-aged pauper. He was constantly searching for a a handout, a good meal regular paying job, couch surfing by friends. This was described in detail. It made the book excessively long. IMO it could have been reduced to a few facts.
Bad news A complete chapter (14) about Kavanagh’s film commentary for his column in The Standard….was that necessary…really?
Good news: First chapters are a good description of life in Ireland 1910s the usual barbaric life of the Irish country poor. "Yet in his heart he knew …despite the lack of outward affection, the beatings and the daily tirades of complaint…he was caught in a net of love…” (pg 51). The last 5 chapters were impressive. I was exhausted after reading this extremely well researched biography. Ms. Quinn is THE Patrick Kavanagh specialist!
Good news We read how Kavanagh uses fiction: pastoral (smooth Georgian poetry) —> Dirty realism —> social criticism —> self-liberation writing his masterpiece The Great Hunger (1942). The strongest point of this book is the analysis of his poems.
Good news Ch 10: Excellent explanation of the poem The Great Hunger . Kavanagh belonged to serf class and adopted the role of peasant spokesman. The Great Hunger is his anti-establishment masterpiece. I’d would never have grasped the metaphors, narration or the revelation what really destroyed Ireland’s rural life.
Irony In 1955 Kavanagh underwent surgery to remove cancerous lung. The two months Kavanagh spent in the Railto Hospital “…as among the happiest of his life.” (pg 489). He was feeling safe and secure, protected from unpaid bills.
Irony Kavanagh plagued by debts all his life ended up in his last years marrying a bookkeeper!
Personal How can a man who leaves school at 13 yr...works as a farm hand until he is 27 yr. as ploughman become a London published poet and one of the most famous poet’s in Ireland? If I was asked to describe Kavanagh in 3 words: talented, tormented, ingrate. He was not an easy person to get along with! I’m impressed how diligently Kavanagh studied the great poets. Just reading all the time and he acquired a complete knowledge of English/Irish poetry….as if he had attended an Irish university. New Rule: Try to read the biography of the great poets before I read their poems. Knowing what the man has been through….makes all the difference how you read his poems. Kavanagh could lob a barrage of insults tempered by occasional compliments. Where did that anger come from?…read the biography.
Book recommendation: James Wright: A life in Poetry American poet 1927-1980. This book was unforgettable!. Perhaps you’ve never heard of JW…it is really worth your reading time!
by Jonathan Blunk (no photo)January 17, 2021
Superb amalgamation of poetic development and personal crisis. The best book I ever read over a most failed man and most successful poet.
February 20, 2019
Excellent.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews