Patrick Kavanagh

This article is about the 20th-century Irish poet. For the 20th-century English poet, see P.J. Kavanagh.

Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) in 1963. Photo by Elinor Wiltshire. Courtesy National Library of Ireland & Wikimedia Commons

Patrick Kavanagh
Born	October 21 1904(1904-Template:MONTHNUMBER-21) Inniskeen, County Monaghan, Ireland
Died	November 30 1967(1967-Template:MONTHNUMBER-30) (aged 63) Dublin, Republic of Ireland
Occupation	Poet, novelist
Nationality	Irish
Period	1928-1967
Genres	poet, novelist
Subjects	Irish life, nature

Patrick Joseph Kavanagh (?21 October 1904 - 30 November 1967) was an Irish poet, novelist, and journalist.

Life

Youth and education

Kavanagh was born 21 or 23 October 1904 at the family home in the townland of Mucker, Inniskeen parish, co. Monaghan, the elder son and 4th of 10 children of James Kavanagh, a cobbler, and his wife, Bridget (Quinn) of Corcreagh, co. Louth, a barmaid, daughter of an agricultural labourer and subsistence farmer.

Kavanagh was educated at Kednaminsha national school in Inniskeen from 1909 till 1917, when he left to be apprenticed in his father's trade and to help on the 9-acre farm his parents had bought in 1910.

The cobbling business was dwindling into a repairs-only trade in the 1920s, and in 1925 the Kavanaghs bought a 16-acre farm a few miles from Mucker, referred to by Patrick in the poem ‘Art McCooey’ as ‘my foreign possessions in Shancoduff’.

In the years before his father's death in 1929 Patrick gradually took over his work, doing some cobbling as a sideline but mainly running the 2 small farms under the direction of his managerial mother. Like the elder sons of neighbouring farmers, working for a pittance in fields that they expected to inherit, he attended weekly mass, bought and sold at fair and market in the nearby towns of Carrickmacross and Dundalk, and spent his few leisure hours playing Gaelic football or pitch and toss or attending dances, wakes, and weddings.

Unlike them, however, he was writing poetry from his early teens, copying the patriotic and sentimental ballads sold on coloured sheets at fairs or to be found at the back of Old Moore's Almanac. Inniskeen already had a practising ballad maker, John McEnaney, known as the ‘Bard of Callenberg’. Ambitious of being more than a local balladist, Kavanagh was also studying and trying to imitate the poems he found in schoolbooks and in Palgrave's [[Palgrave's Golden Treasury|Golden treasury of English poetry].

1929-1939

Kavanagh was almost 21 when, riffling through the papers at a newsagent's shop during an August market in Dundalk, he came upon the Irish Statesman, the weekly journal of arts and ideas edited by George Russell, and discovered the existence of other contemporary poets. This journal became his artistic manual. By the end of 1929 he could write brief nature lyrics with a religious inflection that were acceptable to Russell, and 3 of his poems were published in the journal, among them ‘Ploughman’. When the Irish Statesman closed in April 1930, Kavanagh became a regular contributor to the quarterly Dublin Magazine and his poems also began to appear in English journals.

His earliest visit to Dublin in December 1931 was to make an unannounced call on George Russell, who plied him with books and advice. Emphasising his role as ‘ploughman’, he had walked to Dublin wearing his shabby work clothes rather than take the train. From then on he often visited the city to meet other writers and seek literary stimulus. A farmer–poet was an exotic figure in Dublin's literary circles and he received a great deal of encouragement and kindness.

Kavanagh's debut collection, Ploughman and other poems was published in London by Macmillan in 1936. When the book brought about no change in his life as full-time farmer and spare-time poet, Kavanagh decided in May 1937 to try his fortune in London. Here he was commissioned to write The Green Fool (London, 1938), an autobiography combining a portrait of the artist with a portrait of his local community. It was withdrawn in 1939 when Oliver St John Gogarty prosecuted a successful libel suit against Kavanagh and, despite the favourable reception of the stubbed version in New York, was never reprinted in Kavanagh's lifetime.

Unable to earn a livelihood in London, he moved to Dublin in August 1939. Although he intended his stay there to be a brief interlude before settling in London, the outbreak of the second world war left him stranded and, except for short intervals spent in Inniskeen, London, and New York, he was to be a Dublin-based writer for the remainder of his life.

1939-1955

Courtesy PoemHunter.

Initially Kavanagh came under the influence of Sean O'Faolain and Frank O'Connor, who were engaged in a literary programme of documenting and criticising the Irish state. Kavanagh ceased writing for the Dublin Magazine in 1940 and instead contributed to The Bell, a new Irish monthly launched in October of that year with O'Faolain as editor and O'Connor as poetry editor.

In Dublin, Kavanagh eked out a precarious living as a freelance journalist, writing occasional features and book reviews for the 3 daily newspapers, the Irish Times, the Irish Independent, and the Irish Press. He contributed a twice-weekly gossip column to the Irish Press under the penname ‘Piers Plowman’ (September 1942 to February 1944) and a book review column to the catholic weekly The Standard (February to June 1943). He was a staff reporter on The Standard (August 1945 to 1947) and also its film reviewer (February 1946 to July 1949).

A morning writer who spent the rest of the day on the move, Kavanagh soon became established as ‘a character’, a countryman-about-town: tall, thin, shabbily dressed, wearing a battered hat and thick horn-rimmed spectacles, walking like a ploughman, and speaking in a pronounced south Monaghan accent. While enjoying his own notoriety, he resented the intrusive familiarity and condescension which it elicited and cultivated a gruff rudeness to ward off unwanted company. An endearing and entertaining companion to those he befriended, he was given a wide berth by many Dubliners and fellow writers, who dreaded his abrasive manner and rough tongue.

As the years passed without bringing the permanent and pensionable white-collar job he longed for to relieve him of hack journalism, he grew embittered, feeling that his genius was unrewarded and unappreciated. State or corporate patronage for writers was then unknown and, despite a succession of romantic attachments, Kavanagh's dream of solving his financial difficulties by marriage to a rich woman eluded him. He craved economic security but was destined to spend most of his writing career living hand to mouth, his meagre earnings depleted by an addiction to cigarettes and, from 1950, to gambling on horses and, later, by a growing dependence on alcohol. Well-disposed Dubliners treated the impoverished writer to meals and drinks and gave small donations, as much as they could afford in the 1940s and 1950s when there was little affluence.

From the mid 1940s Kavanagh had begun to satirise Dublin culture in a series of poems, verse playlets, and essays. Most of these were concentrated in 2 monthly magazines, The Bell between 1947 and 1955 and a new avant-garde arts magazine, Envoy (December 1949 to July 1951), to every issue of which he contributed a column entitled ‘Diary’. A target of Kavanagh's satires and social criticism was the undiscriminating Irish bourgeoisie who liked to fraternise with artists, actors, and writers but was incapable of recognising or supporting real talent. The principal and relentless object of his scorn was the contemporary cult of Irish ethnicity in the arts and media, particularly in literature. Above all, the use of Irishness as an aesthetic criterion was anathema to him – so much so that he repeatedly declared, ‘Irishness is a form of anti-art.’ His hostility to the Fianna Fáil government and to the smug, chauvinistic mindset he found endemic in Ireland was given free rein in the 13-week run of the magazine Kavanagh's Weekly (12 April to 5 July 1952), which he wrote with his brother, Peter. This Weekly irritated and alienated so many influential persons and institutions that after its closure he was virtually unemployable in Ireland.

Kavanagh's life reached a nadir between spring 1954 and spring 1955. Attracted by the prospect of a financial windfall, in February 1954 he took a very stressful high court libel action, which he initially lost. By the time he had won the right to appeal against the verdict in March 1955 he was suffering from lung cancer, an illness that inspired one of his best sonnets, ‘The hospital’. While the operation to remove a cancerous lung was successful he never recovered his former robustness and for the remainder of his life was increasingly plagued by health problems.

1955-1967

An extramural lectureship in poetry at University College Dublin (UCD) from April 1955 was intended as a sinecure to ensure the poet a regular income, but he delivered a spring series of lectures on poetry for several years. He also contributed a weekly column to the Irish Farmers Journal (June 1958 to March 1963) and the RTV Guide (January 1964 to October 1967). Almost everything, a recording of the poet reading his own work, was released by Claddagh Records, Dublin, in 1963.

Collected Poems (MacGibbon & Kee, London, 1964), a critical and commercial success, was followed by Collected Prose (MacGibbon & Kee, 1967), and the dramatisation of Tarry Flynn at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in November 1966 was a box-office hit. ‘On Raglan Road’, written in 1946 but collected for the first time in Collected poems and popularised by Luke Kelly of ‘The Dubliners’, became a well-known Irish song. Despite failing health and declining productivity Kavanagh was by now Ireland's unofficial poet laureate, lionised by young poets and students.

On 19 April 1967 he married Katherine Barry Moloney, with whom he had enjoyed a 7-year relationship in London, in the Church of the Three Patrons, Rathgar, Dublin, her family's parish church. Her father was a pharmacist; both her parents had been republican activists in the war of independence and her mother was a sister of revolutionary Kevin Barry.

Kavanagh died of pneumonia in a Dublin nursing home on 30 November 1967. He was buried at Inniskeen.

Writing

Ploughman, and other poems (1926) includes Kavanagh's best early poem, the sonnet ‘Inniskeen Road, July evening’, a wry reflection on the anomaly of a village poet. For the most part his brief lyrics, written in a decorously pastoral vein and suffused with religious imagery, ignored the inelegant realities of his farming milieu.

A comic realist yet lyrical account of his life in Inniskeen, The Green Fool (1938) revealed Kavanagh's ability to project an enduring narrative persona and it was enthusiastically reviewed both in London and Dublin. By the late 1940s he had come to dislike The Green Fool and refused permission to republish it. Nevertheless, the mandate to describe life in his small-farm community changed the course of Kavanagh's writing, compelling him to attend to the subject closest to him, which he had hitherto disregarded as being unworthy of literary treatment.

Kavanaugh's earliest novel, written under the aegis of Sean O'Faolain and Frank O'Connor, about the disenchantments of a young farmer with literary pretensions, proved unpublishable in its early 1940s drafts. However, his new focus in poetry on his country childhood and life as a farmer resulted in several memorable short lyrics, including ‘A Christmas childhood’, ‘Art McCooey’, ‘The long garden’, and a poem of 759 lines, The Great Hunger.

The Great Hunger (Cuala Press, Dublin, 1942) is widely regarded as among the 20th century's finest long poems. In the 1960s Kavanagh was to repudiate The Great Hunger because of its tragic approach and its sociological concern with the woes of the poor, but the poem's portrayal of the day-to-day circumstances and the religious and sexual psyche of an elderly bachelor farmer, Patrick Maguire, brings a world to vivid and prolific life in clear, sharply realised images. The Great Hunger describes a small-farm ethos in which a puritanical catholicism and a preoccupation with economic security combine to render men's and women's lives joyless and emotionally, sexually, and spiritually unfulfilled. Patrick Maguire is presented as a typical Irish farmer, sacrificing himself body and soul to agricultural productivity, living ‘that his little fields may stay fertile’, a human tragedy repeated ‘in every corner of this land’. Yet he also transcends his exemplary status to become a rounded character. The great hunger broke new ground thematically and ideologically at a time when poetry still tended to idealise country life. Technically it was equally daring: written in a mixture of free-verse paragraphs and rhymed stanzas, it deployed the cinematic strategies of zoom and montage in its depiction of locations and characters. Although some critics were uncomfortable with its innovative techniques and disruption of literary pieties, The Great Hunger established Kavanagh as a powerful voice in Irish writing.

It was quickly followed by another long poem, Lough Derg, published posthumously in 1971 and, in 1978, in book form (Martin, Brian, & O'Keeffe, London; Goldsmith Press, the Curragh, Ireland). This poetic documentary on a 3-day pilgrimage to St Patrick's Purgatory in co. Donegal, an anatomy of Irish catholicism, was technically similar to The great hunger but was not as focused, detailed, or controlled. After it, Kavanagh abandoned the long poem.

Kavanagh's literary reputation was much enhanced by the publication of his 2nd collection, A Soul for Sale (Macmillan, London, 1947), through which The Great Hunger, previously available only in an expensive limited edition, became widely known, and also by Tarry Flynn (Pilot Press, London, 1948). While it was admired from the outset the publisher's bankruptcy in 1949 meant that it soon became unavailable.

Tarry Flynn (1948), the final draft of his much revised novel, was an affectionate, and humorous account of a poet–farmer's life in a country parish, which was to acquire classic status and be often republished and reissued from the 1960s.

Kavanagh wrestled with his own proclivity for satire and condemnation, perceiving it as spiritually corrosive and inimical to lyricism: ‘But satire is unfruitful prayer’ (‘Prelude’). This interior struggle became the theme of early 1950s self-admonitory poems such as ‘Auditors in’ and ‘Prelude’. In other fine lyrics from these years – ‘Ante-natal dream’, ‘Kerr's ass’, ‘Innocence’, ‘Epic’, ‘On reading a book on common wild flowers’ – he ponders the imaginative sources of his poetry. Another new poetic theme was a rueful yet unsparing self-portraiture in ‘Bank holiday’, ‘I had a future’, and ‘If ever you go to Dublin town’, as well as in parts of ‘Auditors in’ and ‘Prelude’.

After his convalescence from lung cancer he enjoyed a few months of lyrical renewal when he produced a series of sonnets and couplet poems that celebrated and blessed ordinary urban and rural sights and sounds in a style that combined argot, cliché, and comic rhyming with meditative insights and religious rapture. Among the best known of these are the sonnets ‘October’, ‘Question to life’, and ‘The one’, and 2 sonnets commemorating his summer convalescence in 1955, ‘Canal bank walk’ and ‘Lines written on a seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin’. These were collected in Come Dance with Kitty Stobling (Longmans, Green & Co., London, 1960), the Poetry Society's summer choice.

Critical reputation

In Ireland Kavanagh's posthumous literary reputation was sustained by numerous reprintings of Collected poems (1964) throughout the 1970s and 1980s and by the inclusion of his poems in the leaving certificate poetry anthology, Soundings (edited by Augustine Martin), from 1970 to 2000. It gained momentum from 1996, when the issue of copyright was clarified by the Irish courts. After that The Green Fool and Tarry Flynn remained continuously in print; Selected Poems (London, 1996) was followed by A Poet's Country: Selected prose (Dublin, 2003) and a new edition of Collected Poems (London, 2004). Many Irish poets are Kavanagh partisans; his poetry generates much criticism and discussion; he has been promoted as a Roman catholic writer and thinker; and he is a favourite with the general reader.

Outside Ireland, particularly in the USA, it is quite otherwise. In spite of the best efforts of Irish poets and the repeated championship of the Nobel laureate, Seamus Heaney, Kavanagh is almost unknown. In so far as he is read, it is as the author of Tarry Flynn rather than as a leading Irish poet.

Recognition

Patrick Kavanagh statue, Grand Canal, Dublin, by John Coll. Photo by Joseph Mischyshin. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Geograph.org.

A granite seat in the poet's honour, on the bank of the Grand Canal near Baggot Street Bridge, was unveiled in March 1968; John Coll's life-size bronze sculpture of the poet sitting on a bench on the opposite bank dates from 1991.

Kavanagh's poetic tribute to his friend, Irish American sculptor Jerome Connor, was used in the plaque overlooking Dublin's Phoenix Park dedicated to Connor.

There is also a statue of Kavanagh located outside Raglan Road, the Irish pub and restaurant at Walt Disney World's Downtown Disney in Orlando, Florida.

The Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award is presented each year for an unpublished collection of poems.

The annual Patrick Kavanagh Weekend takes place on the last weekend in November in Inniskeen.

The Patrick Kavanagh Centre, an interpretative centre set up to commemorate the poet, is located in Inniskeen.

There are portraits by Edward McGuire, Patrick O'Connor, Micheal Ó Nualláin, Seán O'Sullivan, and Patrick Swift (both lithograph and oils), and a sculpted head by Desmond MacNamara. Photographs, in addition to Elinor Wiltshire's, include a picture by Bill Brandt and a photo by Evelyn Hofer.

A detail from John Skelton's posthumous portrait, based on Hofer's 1967 photo, was adopted as the logo of the Patrick Kavanagh Centre, Inniskeen, and as the basis of the commemorative centenary stamp issued by An Post, Ireland, in 2004.

In popular culture

THE DUBLINERS - Raglan Road

When the Irish Times compiled a list of favourite Irish poems in 2000, 10 of Kavanagh's poems were in the top 50, and he was rated the 2nd favourite poet behind W.B. Yeats.

Films include Self portrait (1962), a talk to camera by Kavanagh, produced by Telefís Éireann, A film profile of Patrick Kavanagh (1966), directed for Telefís Éireann by Adrian Cronin, Where Genesis begins (1978), directed by Bill Miskelly, and Patrick Kavanagh – no man's fool (2004), directed by Sé Merry Doyle.

Kavangh's poem "On Raglan Road" (set to the traditional air "Fáinne Geal an Lae" composed by Thomas Connellan in the 17th century) has been performed by numerous artists as diverse as Van Morrison, Luke Kelly, Dire Straits, Billy Bragg, Sinéad O'Connor, and Joan Osborne.

Actor Russell Crowe has stated he is a fan of Kavanagh. "I like the clarity and the emotiveness of (Patrick) Kavanagh. I like how he combines the kind of mystic into really clear, evocative work that can make you glad you are alive". In February 2002, Crowe quoted Kavanagh during his acceptance speech at the annual BAFTA awards. When he became aware that the Kavanagh quote had been cut from the final broadcast he became aggressive with the BBC producer responsible. he said "the thing is that it was about a one minute fifty speech but they've cut a minute out of it". The poem that was cut was "Sanctity", a 4-line poem that he delivered in less than a minute: "To be a poet and not know the trade, / To be a lover and repel all women; / Twin ironies by which great saints are made, / The agonising pincer-jaws of heaven."

Publications

Poetry

• Ploughman, and other poems. London: Macmillan, 1936.
• The Great Hunger: A poem. Cuala, 1942; Irish University Press, 1971.
• A Soul for Sale: Poems. London: Macmillan, 1947.
• Recent Poems. Hand Press, 1958.
• Come Dance With Kitty Stobling, and other poems. Longmans, Green, 1960; Dufour, 1964.
• Collected Poems. Devin-Adair, 1964. (contents)
• Complete Poems (edited by Peter Kavanagh). Hand Press, 1972.
• Lough Derg. Goldsmith, 1978; Martin Brian & O'Keefe, 1978.
• The Great Hunger: Poem into play (with play by Tom Mac Intyre). Mullingar, CO: Lilliput Press, 1988.

Novels

• The Green Fool (fictionalized autobiography). M. Joseph, 1938; Harper, 1939; Martin Brian & O'Keefe, 1971.
• Tarry Flynn: A novel. Pilot, 1948; Devin-Adair, 1949; Martin Brian & O'Keefe, 1972.
• By Night Unstarred: An autobiographical novel (edited by Peter Kavanagh). Goldsmith, 1977; Hand Press, 1978.

Non-fiction

• Afterword to Peter Kavanagh, Irish Mythology: A dictionary (3 volumes). Hand Press, 1958-1959.
• Self Portrait (autobiographical television script). Dolmen, 1964.
• Introduction to W. Steuart Trench, Realities of Irish Life. MacGibbon & Kee, 1966.
• Collected Prose. MacGibbon & Kee, 1967.
• Introduction to The Autobiography of William Carleton. MacGibbon & Kee, 1968.
• Kavanagh's Weekly: A journal of literature and politics (anthology; (with Peter Kavanagh & others). Goldsmith, 1981.
• No Earthly Estate: God and Patrick Kavanagh: An anthology. Dublin: Columba Press, 2002.

Edited

• Ivor Gurney, Selected Poems (selected & introduced by Kavanagh). New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Collected editions

• November Haggard: Uncollected prose and verse (edited by Peter Kavanagh). Hand Press, 1971.
• A Patrick Kavanagh Anthology (edited by Eugene Robert Platt). Commedia, 1973.

Letters

• Lapped Furrows: Correspondence, 1933-1967, between Patrick and Peter Kavanagh, with other ocuments (edited by Peter Kavanagh). Hand Press, 1969.
• Love's Tortured Headland: A Sequel to 'Lapped Furrows' (edited by Peter Kavanagh). Hand Press, 1974.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

Audio / video

Inniskeen Road July Evening & On an apple-ripe September morning

In memory of my mother by patrick kavanagh

• Almost Everything (LP). Dublin: Claddagh, 1964.
• English Poets: Spender, Tomlinson, Kavanagh (by Stephen Spender, Charles Tomlinson, & Patrick Kavanagh) (LP). New York: Applause, 1968.
• Abbey Theatre, The Abbey Reads Yeats / Kavanagh (cassette). Dublin: Paycock, 1985.

Except where noted, discographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of Irish poets

References

• Antoinette Quinn, "Kavanagh, Patrick Joseph", Dictionary of Irish Biography, October 2009. Web, Aug. 24, 2022.

Fonds

The principal archive of Kavanagh's papers is in the library of UCD; the Harry Ransome Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin and the National Library of Ireland also have significant manuscript holdings and the latter has a collection of photos by Elinor Wiltshire.

• Patrick Kavanagh Archive, University College Dublin

External links

Poems

• Patrick Kavanagh: two poems at Western Michigan University
• 8 poems by Kavanagh: "March," "Advent," "Wet Evening in April," "A Christmas Childhood," "October," "Raglan Road," "On an Apple-Ripe September Morning," "Inniskeen Road: July Evening"
• Patrick Kavanagh 1904-1967 at the Poetry Foundation
• 8 of Kavanagh's shorter poems at Trinity College, Dublin
• Patrick Kavanagh at PoemHunter (22 poems)

Audio / video

• Patrick Kavanagh (1908-1967) at The Poetry Archive

Books

• Patrick Kavanagh at Amazon.com

About

• Patrick Kavanagh in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Patrick Kavanagh at Irish Culture and Customs
• "A Tribute to Patrick Kavanagh" by John Montague, Irish Times, 1967
• "Patrick Kavanagh Remembered" by Martin Doyle, Irish Times, 2017
• Patrick Kavanagh: 1904-1967 at Ricorso.net
• Patrick Kavanagh 1904-1967 Official website
• Patrick Kavanagh exhibition, RTE Archives
• Patrick Kavanagh Centre website
• Patrick Kavanagh Grand Canal South Bank Seat

This article incorporates text from the Dictionary of Irish Biography, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license. Original article is at: Kavanagh, Patrick Joseph