COLLECTED POEMS

PATRICK KAVANAGH was born in Inniskeen, County Monaghan, in 1904. His verse collections included Ploughman and Other Poems (1936), A Soul for Sale (1947) and Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and Other Poems (1960). He also wrote the novel Tarry Flynn (1948) and an autobiography, The Green Fool (1938). He died in 1967.

ANTOINETTE QUINN is the author of Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography (2001) and editor of Patrick Kavanagh: A Poet’s Country, Selected Prose (2003) and of his Selected Poems (1996).

PATRICK KAVANAGH

Collected Poems

Edited by ANTOINETTE QUINN

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This collection first published by Allen Lane 2004
Published in Penguin Classics 2005
1

Copyright 1929, 1930, 1931, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956 by Patrick Kavanagh
Copyright © Patrick Kavanagh, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966
Copyright © Katherine B. Kavanagh, 1972, 1978
Copyright © The Trustees of the Estate of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency
Introduction and Notes copyright © Antoinette Quinn, 2004
All rights reserved

The moral right of the editor has been asserted

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EISBN: 978–0–141–90679–9

Contents

Acknowledgements

I first read Patrick Kavanagh’s poetry in Collected Poems (1964), and wish to record a debt of gratitude and affection to this collection even while superseding it.

I would like to thank the following libraries for giving me access to the poems Patrick Kavanagh published in journals or to his unpublished manuscript poems: the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin; the Mugar Memorial Library, Boston City University; the University of Victoria Library, British Columbia; the Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York at Buffalo; the Cambridge University Library; the Morris Library, University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale; the National Library of Ireland, Dublin; the Royal Irish Academy Library, Dublin; Trinity College Dublin Library; the British Library, London.

A special thank you to Ms Norma Jessop, the librarian in charge of Special Collections in the University College Dublin Library at Belfield, which houses the Kavanagh Archive, the largest single collection of Kavanagh material.

James Swift very kindly lent me the typescript of the unpublished 1955 collection.

Patrick Kavanagh’s poems are printed by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency.

Introduction

Beginnings

‘My beginnings were so peculiarly humble and illiterate
that I have never dared to write about them.’

Patrick Kavanagh,

Poetry Society Bulletin, Spring 1960

The elder son of a cobbler and nine-acre farmer, Patrick Kavanagh (1904–67) was born and reared in the townland of Mucker in the parish of Inniskeen, County Monaghan, and left primary school at the age of thirteen to be apprenticed to his father’s trade and to work the land. For over twenty years he lived the life of the ordinary young Irish farmer of the period, toiling for a few shillings’ pocket money in fields he expected some day to inherit. (Cobbling increasingly became a sideline as shoe shops and shoe factories opened in nearby towns, and his parents expanded their farm to twenty-five acres.) Like other local farmers, he bought and sold at fair and market, went to Sunday Mass, attended the wakes, funerals and weddings of neighbours, played pitch and toss at the crossroads, cycled to dances. He was also goalie for the Inniskeen Gaelic football team. What set him apart from his fellows was a habit of reading and writing poetry after hours, usually by candlelight in an upstairs room, away from the hurly-burly of the family kitchen. Even in his upstairs hideaway, he was frequently interrupted to perform some chore. A note on one of his early manuscript collections indicates the conditions under which these poems were written:

…sitting at the end of the day upstairs in a cold corner by the light of a candle. A mother’s voice calling every now and then, ‘Come down and throw a lock of turnips to the unfortunate cows.’¹

As the elder son in a family of daughters, he was at his parents’ beck and call: ‘If it wasn’t the turnips, the pigs were after breaking loose, or a hen they wanted me help catch for the fowl dealer.’² He seemed destined to outgrow his extraordinary interest in poetry and to end up as ‘some mute, inglorious Milton’.

Later, Kavanagh would dispute Thomas Gray’s view in ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’ that a potentially great writer will be silenced by being born into an impoverished underclass living far from the metropolis: ‘…if the potentialities are there, it is almost certain that they will find a way out; they will burst a road,’ he said.³ Yet he never denied the difficulties confronting the self-taught as compared with the university-educated writer who is likely to be put on the right road by ‘some strange awakener of genius’ in his student days and thus spared a lot of trouble.⁴ He was impatient with those who romanticized the under-educated country poet as an inspired lyricist piping down the valleys wild. To Kavanagh, the verses of the self-taught were characterized not by spontaneity and originality but by derivativeness, the imitation of old-fashioned models:

…when a country body begins to progress into the world of print he does not write out of his rural innocence – he writes out of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.⁵

He was speaking here from personal experience, for he had spent eight years learning his craft from this anthology and from school readers, as well as from even humbler sources, such as the patriotic and emigrant ballads to be found at the back of Old Moore’s Almanac and in the popular weekly Ireland’s Own. The influence of these last two models is evident in an early poem beginning

On the whin-covered slope in fierce battle-array

Stood the Inniskeen men at the close of the day…

Palgrave and the schoolbooks lie behind such lines as

O break cold heart!

Thou’rt lost

For want of wine…

and

I knocked at your door

And craved one grain of gold

It would not ope to my knocking…

His study of canonical English poetry had convinced the apprentice poet that ‘what happen[ed] in his own fields’ was not ‘stuff for the Muses’⁶ and that his vernacular was not a legitimate poetic language.

1929–38

One August day in 1925 while he was at the grass seed market in the town of Dundalk, Kavanagh at last encountered an ‘awakener of genius’. Riffling through the magazines in a newsagent’s, he came upon the Irish Statesman, the weekly journal of arts and ideas edited by George Russell, AE. For the first time he learned of the existence of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and W. B. Yeats. From then until the periodical folded in 1930, he educated himself from the pages of the Irish Statesman and by 1929 was able to produce the kind of vague religio-rural verse of which AE approved. Among the three poems AE accepted was ‘Ploughman’, printed in 1930 and selected for a London-published anthology of the year’s Best Poems. ‘Ploughman’ was to be Kavanagh’s passport into literary circles. When he finally plucked up the courage to visit AE in Dublin in December 1931, he made the sixty-mile journey on foot, rather than taking the train, and wore his patched working clothes to impress the ex-editor with his ‘ploughman’ credentials.

AE was renowned for his encouragement of budding poets, his ‘canaries’ as Yeats dismissively dubbed them. He loaded Kavanagh with books, lent him back copies of Poetry (Chicago) and introduced him to other writers. From then on, Kavanagh often took the train to Dublin to visit AE, extend his literary acquaintance and attend plays at the Abbey Theatre. Seumas O’Sullivan, poet and editor of the quarterly Dublin Magazine, took over as his Irish publisher in 1931. This magazine was prestigious and the name Patrick Kavanagh gradually became known in Irish literary circles. Even before he was a regular contributor to the Dublin Magazine, his work began appearing in two English journals, the Spectator and John O’London’s.

At the outset Kavanagh was welcomed and patronized as a peasant⁷ poet. Peasantry, made fashionable by Literary Revival writers such as Douglas Hyde, J. M. Synge and Lady Gregory, was still a modish literary property in Dublin, abbreviated in Abbey Theatre jargon to ‘PQ’ (peasant quality). While peasants were frequently encountered on the page and the stage, a farmer turned poet was a literary curiosity. When his first collection was published by Macmillan in their beginners’ series, Contemporary Poets, in 1936, predictably the volume was entitled Ploughman and Other Poems. It was actually Kavanagh’s appearance, gait and south Monaghan accent that proclaimed his small-farm origins. His poetry, though it drew on rural images, could have been produced by someone who had holidayed in the country or was familiar with nature poetry. ‘Ploughman’, for instance, had come to him while he was tilling an acre of land with a rusty plough pulled by a ‘kicking mare’; such inelegant facts as the rust and the unruly mare have been erased from the ensuing poem, where ploughing is transformed into an aesthetic/ecstatic activity. As Kavanagh later observed of the religious poet Philip Francis Little, he was ‘all anxiety to read eternal messages in the earthly symbol’, not realizing that poetry needs ‘a great deal of carnal method’.⁸

Most of the lyrics in his first collection are slight apprentice offerings; their four-line rhymed stanzas, though written in the first person, betray little of the writer’s actual context or circumstances. In ‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’, however, Kavanagh breaks new ground. The subject, which he treats half-ruefully, half-playfully, is the anomaly of being an Inniskeen poet. This sonnet is allusive rather than derivative, humorously adapting a schoolbook poem (William Cowper’s ‘Verses Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk’) to his own situation. Sonnet decorum is flouted from the outset by the introduction of ‘Billy Brennan’s barn’ and bicycles. The language barrier between the ‘half-talk code’ of his small-farm class and the ‘solemn talk’ of the poetic canon, far from intimidating the young poet, is now one of his themes.

In 1936 Kavanagh was still a full-time farmer, hopeful that some rich Dublin patron would pluck him from the fields. When this failed to happen, he decided to try his luck in London, timing his visit to coincide with the coronation of George VI on 12 May 1937. Through the good offices of the Northern Irish poet, translator and novelist Helen Waddell, a reader for Constable, he was commissioned to write an autobiography, The Green Fool, and spent the next five months in London working on it. This commission proved a turning point. He was now compelled to describe his own life and small-farm milieu, a subject he had previously skirted or ignored. The very expansiveness of the narrative project – 350 pages of prose – emancipated him from the verbal and syntactical constraints of the minimalist lyric. His autobiography reveals a talent for comedy, an alert ear for dialogue, a direct, uncluttered style, and a capacity to endear himself to the reader by projecting a charming narrative persona.

Kavanagh came to detest The Green Fool, condemning it for pandering to the different expectations of two metropolitan audiences: a London readership for whom Irish peasants were comic buffoons with a gift for the gab, and a Dublin literary set who regarded them as nobly primitive, echt-Irish figures spouting songs and stories.⁹ The book did succeed in appealing to both audiences and was highly praised by reviewers in London and Dublin in 1938 and the following year in New York. Yet Kavanagh’s verdict on it was too harsh. While The Green Fool undoubtedly sanitizes and simplifies the way of life it describes, it is conscious of literary orthodoxies and often defies them. Inniskeen is not Innisfree.

Unfortunately, Kavanagh’s triumphant debut was spoiled when Oliver St John Gogarty took a libel action as a result of an innocuous throwaway remark on page 300 and, to the publisher’s surprise, won. It was a dreadful setback for a young writer at the outset of his career and it was not the only disappointment.

A few months previously, Macmillan had rejected a second collection of poems. Kavanagh was by now an overly prolific poet: he still had no sense of direction, was unable to distinguish between the good and the bad among his own verses and asked advice of almost everyone he knew. As ‘The Hired Boy’ and ‘My People’ show, he was becoming conscious of his responsibility as a representative of the small-farm and farm-labouring classes. At the same time, his socializing with writers and intellectuals was making him aware of his own educational inadequacies, as he acknowledges in ‘The Irony of It’. He was a hit-and-miss writer, occasionally turning out a fine lyric. Seumas O’Sullivan at the Dublin Magazine showed critical discernment, selecting three of the best, ‘Sanctity’, ‘Shancoduff’ and ‘Memory of My Father’. John Gawsworth, the London poet and anthologist, who read the 150-odd pieces Kavanagh had accumulated since the mid-1930s, was altogether less discriminating. Together, and separately, they assembled at least six collections, none of which was published. Ten years later, Kavanagh would scribble on a batch of poems in one of these 1930s collections, ‘All unpub. all rightly so.’¹⁰

1939–46

By spring 1939 Kavanagh was determined to abandon farming and become a professional writer. He was back in London from April, looking for work as a reviewer and trying his hand at a novel, The Land Remains. Michael Joseph, publisher of The Green Fool, had an option on this novel but had offered no advance, feeling that he was owed £400 since the libel case. The penniless would-be novelist petitioned Harold Macmillan for employment and was offered a weekly retainer provided he could free himself of Joseph. When Joseph refused, Kavanagh could not afford to stay on in London.

That August, instead of returning to Mucker, Kavanagh moved to Dublin to live on a temporary basis with his young brother Peter, a teacher, and turn out a potboiler to fulfil his obligation to Joseph. The outbreak of war the following month prevented any return to London. Faute de mieux, he became a Dublin-based freelance writer. During his first three years in Dublin, he attempted to survive on the pittance he earned from reviewing regularly for the Irish Times and publishing the odd poem or feature article. (There was a short reprieve from this hand-to-mouth existence when he was the recipient of the first AE literary award of £100 in January 1940.) A morning writer, he spent his afternoons hunting unsuccessfully for a white-collar job and his evenings in the Palace Bar, the pub where writers and artists gathered. His frugal upbringing meant that he had not yet acquired a taste for alcohol, so he frequented the Palace for the conversation and the contacts, familiarizing himself with the opinions and attitudes of Dublin’s literati. After a few years he had absorbed whatever he could learn from them and familiarity bred the contempt he later voiced in ‘The Paddiad’.

Kavanagh would come to view the Palace set as ‘the dregs of the old Literary Revival’,¹¹ ‘fusty, safe and dim’ writers still preoccupied with producing a distinctively ethnic Irish literature long after political independence had been achieved. By contrast, Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain, two Cork-born writers of his own age who had befriended Kavanagh, envisaged a documentary, ‘condition of Ireland’ literature, reporting the diversity of life in the Free State. In their opinion, the romantic, idealistic era just past was to be succeeded by a period of disillusioned realism. Yeats had died in 1939 and when O’Faolain became the founding editor of a new literary journal, The Bell, in 1940 and co-opted O’Connor as poetry editor, his first editorial set out his post-Yeatsian programme for Irish letters. The writer’s aim was no longer to boost national and nationalist morale but to record his own experience of life in Ireland. The Bell’s socio-realist aesthetic offered the floundering Kavanagh an artistic programme.

He broke with the Dublin Magazine after 1939 and the first number of The Bell carried his poem ‘Stony Grey Soil’. He was also working on a new novel about small-farm life entitled Stony Grey Soil, with an anti-clerical plot suggested to him by O’Faolain. It had the kind of hero approved by the two Cork men, a young farmer whose aspirations are stifled by the realities of life in Ireland, compelled to marry a woman he does not love for the sake of her dowry.

During 1940–41 Kavanagh published a series of lyrics based on his childhood and on his adult years as a farmer in Inniskeen: affectionate, yet indecorously realist poems which include images of ‘old buckets, rusty-holed’, ‘the hen’s rooting where the sow scratches’, ‘barrels of blue potato-spray’, cleaning out the cart after a day spent transporting dung. He was reading W. H. Auden and was excited by his fresh, sharp images. His own lyrics were too true to life even for O’Faolain, who felt they lacked polish and refinement. ‘Kavanagh doesn’t wash his poetry’s ears,’ he complained.¹² The customary gap between Kavanagh’s poetry and fiction was now closing and his new lyrics were peopled poems in which ‘a world comes to life’. This overlap between fiction and poetry shows in the use of the same title, ‘Stony Grey Soil’, for a poem and novel, but it is most evident in his crossing of the two genres in the novella-poems, Why Sorrow? and The Great Hunger. Each focuses on the secret frustrations of an elderly celibate, a priest-farmer in one, a bachelor farmer in the other, both living a double life, outwardly successful and inwardly tormented. In these long poems Kavanagh experiments with an irregular mix of free verse paragraphs and rhymed stanzas, a structure that was possibly influenced by The Waste Land. Why Sorrow? survives only in fragmentary form; The Great Hunger has come to be regarded as one of the finest long poems of the twentieth century.

The Great Hunger teems with images of country life at different seasons of the year and times of the day, offering a shockingly honest and comprehensive portrayal of a subsistence farmer’s life. Kavanagh’s technique is cinematic, cutting from scene to scene and zooming in on telling details, compressing a lifetime of procrastination and frustration into 759 lines. Patrick Maguire, the poem’s anti-hero, is a pathetic figure, brutalized, even vegetized, by a fourteen-hour working day; an elderly wifeless and childless man, who ‘lives that his little fields may stay fertile’, sacrificing sexuality to agricultural productivity. He is timid, cautious, passive, a victim of the small-farm ethos embodied by his mother, in which success in life is measured in terms of high crop-yields, pre-marital chastity and regular attendance at Mass and confession. In foregrounding the plight of the bachelor farmer, Kavanagh was confronting one of the most crucial sociological issues in Ireland at this period: the 1936 census figures, released in 1938, had exposed the decline and depopulation of the countryside through late marriage and failure to marry.

The poem is at its most devastating in its assault on the cherished nationalist fiction of Irish spiritual ascendancy which was largely centred on peasant Ireland. With oracular authority, Kavanagh announces the victory of materialism over spirituality in ‘every corner of this land’, opening and closing his poem with an ‘apocalypse of clay’, a shocking perversion of Christ’s incarnation. The Great Hunger also establishes a vital connection between spirituality and sexuality, generally presented as conflicting drives in contemporary Irish religious discourse. Kavanagh’s God is one who delights in love and lust but has been distorted into a custodian of extramarital chastity. The poem’s title and the recurrent motif of potato-harvesting suggest a disturbing analogy between the psycho-sexual deprivation that is depopulating and devitalizing contemporary Ireland and the famine that ravaged the country in the mid-nineteenth century. Now the potato crop flourishes, but human lives are blighted.

The Great Hunger is a didactic poem with palpable designs on the reader. It consciously sets out to subvert the cult of primitivism common in country-based poetry since the time of the Lyrical Ballads, as well as undermining the small-farm Utopia envisaged by Éamon de Valera, Ireland’s Taoiseach. Towards the end of his life, Kavanagh would repudiate The Great Hunger because of its sociological concern with the ‘woes of the poor’.¹³ By then he had long since outgrown The Bell’s socio-realist aesthetic. When it was first published in 1942, however, the poem was remarkable not only for its political and poetic radicalism and its technical daring but for its personal courage. The ‘ploughman poet’ was demolishing the peasant myth which had given him his entrée to the world of Irish letters.

Lough Derg, Kavanagh’s third and last long poem, dates from July 1942. In this poetic documentary on a three-day pilgrimage to St Patrick’s Purgatory, he broadens his cultural analysis to present an anatomy of Catholic Ireland, urban and rural, North and South, poor and middle-class. The poem is biased against the middle classes and lenient towards the needy poor, shaping their prayers into sonnets. Lough Derg may have been included in the collection A Satirical Pilgrimage, rejected in 1944 by the Cuala Press, the publisher of The Great Hunger, and the following year by Faber.¹⁴ It was only posthumously printed. However, as ‘Advent’ reveals, Kavanagh was having doubts about his socio-analytic programme by December 1942 and there were to be no further poems in this vein.

That October he finally secured regular employment as a twice-weekly gossip columnist with a large-circulation daily, the Irish Press. His column, written under the pen-name Piers Plowman, often included snatches of verse, usually light and topical. At the same time he was opening hostilities against the Literary Revival writers, Synge, Lady Gregory and Yeats, in a series of book reviews for a Catholic weekly, the Standard, asserting that, as writers from a Protestant Ascendancy caste, they were outside the mainstream consciousness of the Irish, were not ‘the voice of the people’. Already, he was jousting for top place in the Irish literary pantheon and he would continue to challenge the hegemony of the Literary Revival for the rest of his life. By spring 1944 he was once again unemployed and his disenchantment with Dublin began to surface in ‘Pegasus’ and ‘A Wreath for Tom Moore’s Statue’. The following year two archbishops¹⁵ came to his rescue and he was appointed staff journalist and, from 1946, film critic on the Standard.

The poetry of the war years was collected in A Soul for Sale (1947), submitted to Macmillan in 1945. The early submission date meant that it excluded two of his best-known 1940s poems, the elegy ‘In Memory of My Mother’ and the popular love song ‘On Raglan Road’. It was Kavanagh’s first mature collection and the first time The Great Hunger, which had been published in a limited edition, was widely available. This long poem proved controversial because it challenged literary pieties about peasantry and was so technically innovative, yet many of his fellow-writers saluted its imaginative power. Kavanagh was now acknowledged as a force to be reckoned with in Irish letters.

1947–55

By the late 1940s Kavanagh was looked on by Dubliners as a ‘character’. His job as staff reporter on the Standard had lasted only two years and he had reverted to being a morning writer who usually spent the rest of the day in town. Tall, thin and unkempt, he was a familiar figure in his battered hat and horn-rimmed spectacles, muttering to himself as he walked and occasionally kicking out at imaginary obstacles. He had moved to his long-term residence, an apartment at 62 Pembroke Road, in 1943, and the surrounding area, which he called his ‘Pembrokeshire’, gradually took over from Inniskeen as his village. Many of the large Georgian houses in this part of Dublin were divided into apartments occupied by young married couples or office workers. He enjoyed the hospitality of some of the married couples and chatted up pretty single women, taking an interest in their jobs and romances. He was also known for his kindly way with children, telling them stories and giving them sweets. Towards adults who presumed an unwanted familiarity, his rudeness became legendary. Living too much in the public eye, he protected himself against intrusiveness by terse, growled insults or snarled requests for money. He seemed determined to exaggerate his difference from his fellow-writers, generally a neatly dressed, middle-class and mannerly group. To those he befriended, he was an entertaining and endearing man; to those he deliberately alienated, a monster.

From 1947 Kavanagh resumed his association with The Bell under its new editor, Peadar O’Donnell, novelist and socialist. His first contribution was an elegy for the Labour leader Jim Larkin. O’Donnell serialized Kavanagh’s novel Tarry Flynn and puffed its author. This novel had started out as Stony Grey Soil seven years previously, had been revised and resubmitted as Mother and Children to Macmillan and Methuen in 1944 and, finally, stripped of its anti-clerical plot and unhappy ending, emerged as a lyrical yet comic portrait of the artist as a young farmer. Published by the Pilot Press, London, in 1948, its shelf-life was short because the publishers went into liquidation a year later. Though it was a critical success from the first, its present status as a classic of Irish country life was established only when it began to be republished from 1962.

The verse playlet ‘The Wake of the Books’, in the November 1947 issue of The Bell, inaugurated a new phase in Kavanagh’s writing, a period of sustained cultural criticism. Over the coming years he would often resort to dramatic techniques when travestying attitudes to the arts in Dublin: his characters condemn themselves out of their own mouths in dramas, dramatic monologues or passages of dialogue within a poem. ‘The Wake of the Books’, however, makes little or no coherent contribution to its ostensible subject, the debate over the draconian application of the Irish Censorship Act of 1929. Censorship never interested Kavanagh; here he is just as concerned with the attitudes of potential patrons and hangers-on in the arts world and with poetry as an antidote to their jaded cynicism. When The Bell suspended publication for lack of funding in 1949, John Ryan, the editor of a new monthly periodical, Envoy, offered him a platform to air his views on literature and culture in a column entitled ‘Diary’. Among his chief targets in this lively and often outrageous column were ‘the pygmy literature of the Literary Revival’ and the still prevalent literary obsession with Irishness in theme and technique. So vehement was his opposition to the use of Irishness as an aesthetic criterion that he more than once asserted, ‘Irishness is a form of anti-art.’¹⁶

In a spate of satiric verse published in Envoy and elsewhere, he voiced his disdain for Dublin as a cultural capital, railing against its literary cliques (‘Jungle’, ‘The Paddiad’), its substitution of literary chit-chat in the pub for the hard graft of writing (‘Tale of Two Cities’), its cult of actors and film stars (‘Adventure in the Bohemian Jungle’), government patronage of the arts (‘Irish Stew’) and the Arts Council (‘Prelude’). ‘The Christmas Mummers’ satirizes a peculiarly Irish go-getter mentality which manipulates national sentiment and the cult of ethnicity in its scramble for self-advancement. Patriotism is shown to be the first refuge of the Irish scoundrel. Kavanagh draws on defamiliarizing tropes in these satires: Dublin is a jungle or, in ‘The Defeated’, a piggery. A recurrent trope is Dublin as hell, devoted to the worship of second-rate art. In ‘The Paddiad’, set in a literary pub reminiscent of the Palace or Pearl Bar, Irish poetry is presided over by the polite, smooth-talking devil Mediocrity. His antithesis, Paddy Conscience, with his ‘drunken talk and dirty clothes’, bears a striking resemblance to Paddy Kavanagh. Indeed, he is often recognizable as the hero of his satires: an outsider and outcast, appalled by Ireland’s complacent, self-congratulatory sense of its cultural importance. In ‘Adventure in the Bohemian Jungle’ he is identifiable as the ‘man from the mythical land of simple country’, literally nauseated by the alliance between big business, show business and the Catholic Church. Sometimes, as in ‘The Hero’ (originally ‘Dublin’), the city is belittled by the depiction of the poet narrator as a giant among pygmies, Gulliver in Lilliput, a godlike figure towering above mere mortals. The satires were introvertedly local. Addressed to an Irish and mainly Dublin readership, they did not travel well. The best of them, ‘The Paddiad’, was rejected by Poetry (Chicago); Cyril Connolly, who took it for his London monthly, Horizon, was familiar with Dublin’s Palace Bar. Kavanagh was wary of his own aptitude for satire, seeing it as inimical to his lyrical gift, diminishing him spiritually: it was ‘unfruitful prayer’. Several poems of this period thematize the quarrel within his own psyche between satire and love.

Fortunately, just as he seemed about to typecast himself as a perpetually earnest and outraged prig in his verse, he discovered a more multi-dimensional role, the self as character rather than moral exemplar. He began to write humorous, vernacular, confessional poems in which the self is portrayed as a combination of fallible human person (often an unsuccessful lover) and dedicated poet. In ‘Bank Holiday’, ‘Auditors In’ and ‘Prelude’, even in ‘If Ever You Go to Dublin Town’, he takes the reader into his confidence, revealing himself to be a remarkably honest and shrewd self-analyst, alert to the pitfalls of his own temperament and circumstances. Instead of condemning Dublin’s devilry, he is intent on casting out his own demons. The scolding tones of Mrs Flynn berating her lazy, errant son, Tarry, are now internalized. Because it was so intimate and involved so much exposure both of his own unsaintly character and of his reverence for the poet in himself, this was a risky poetry to publish in a small, gossipy society like Dublin. It would never have occurred to him to conceal his high romantic view of the poet’s status: whether ‘poor or pushed around’, the poet was always to Kavanagh a prophet, a visionary, a theologian, a god. It infuriated him that so many other Irish writers laid spurious claim to this elevated status. ‘The standing army of Irish poets’ seldom falls below 10,000, he commented sardonically.¹⁷

In the satires Kavanagh had shown a talent for mimicry and