There are certain poets of whom it can be said that they have a unique personal vision—Blake and Yeats for example—and one knows immediately what is meant. They have a new, inimitable, disturbing way of looking at life and, at their best, they communicate this vision successfully. In twentieth-century Ireland, one poet (apart from Yeats) possesses such a vision—Patrick Kavanagh—who, for some unaccountable reason, is one of the most misunderstood and undervalued poets of our time. It is with Blake and Yeats that Kavanagh must be compared, for he is a visionary poet and towards the end of his life he claimed that he had achieved a truly comic vision…. It is the purpose of this essay to clarify what Kavanagh meant by the comic vision; to show how comedy appears in his poetry; and in so doing to trace his development. (p. 159)

Patrick Kavanagh never suffered from abortive ideas of sophistication. Like all the true visionaries, his aesthetic, scattered carelessly in fragments here and there, is distinguished by its sanity and sheer good sense. It is also blissfully free of all pretentiousness and obscurity. The clarity of all his statements on poetry is a mark of his confidence and clearsightedness. (pp. 160-61)

The poems in Kavanagh's early work, Ploughman and Other Poems, are beautifully simple. Yet they contain certain elements which endure into his later work, though in a transfigured way. In the introduction to his Collected Poems, Kavanagh tells us that, for him, poetry is 'a mystical thing, and a dangerous thing'. It is mystical because it is concerned with man's dialogue with God, the foundation-stone of all Kavanagh's work, the source of his humour and sanity…. (p. 161)

Belief in [a] gay, imaginative, unfeared, creative God vitalizes Kavanagh's early work. It is this spirit of positive belief that makes such simple lyrics as 'To A Blackbird' so authentic and buoyant…. In that poem is, in genetic form, another vital aspect of the comic vision achieved by Kavanagh towards the end of his life: his separateness, his detachment, the sense that he can participate but never belong. (pp. 161-62)

This is another aspect of his vision which needs to be stressed: the significance of the casual and the apparently insignificant. In this attitude is the refusal to be deceived by anything, the determination to accept himself, and by so doing, to forget himself….

In the best of his early poems Kavanagh looks into himself, desiring this detachment, the key to not-caring about the 'important'. He is trying, in the poetic sense, to keep his soul pure. (p. 163)

[It] can be said of him that he is the only great modern poet who never wrote an obscure poem. He recognized that, in most cases, obscurity is simply a failure of the poet's imagination, the sanctuary of the inadequate….

This simplicity, present from the beginning in Kavanagh's work, is characteristic of his achieved comic vision. He saw that his simplicity was a gift from the gay, imaginative God; that it was the most difficult thing in the world to achieve; and that if sophistication has any meaning at all (and no word in the English language is more abused or misunderstood) it means that the poet has the courage to be utterly himself, his best self, and that nothing else will do. (p. 164)

Because Kavanagh passionately believed in his own conception of simplicity, he was impatient, both in his own work and in the work of others, with whatever violated that conception…. Passionate belief is certainly the source of whatever achievement lies in the future; it is also the reason why poets are sometimes compelled to distort their accomplishments in the past. Because of his beliefs, Kavanagh was guilty of this distortion in his evaluation of The Great Hunger. He somehow failed to see that this splendid though rather uneven work was a vital stage in his journey toward the comic vision. Kavanagh had to write The Great Hunger, and in his own time, he had to dismiss it…. The Great Hunger is a necessary realistic outburst from an essentially transcendental imagination; it is a furious episode in a story that is fundamentally passive, reposed and serene; it is an angry protest from one who really believes in calm statement; it is a fierce hysterical digression in the journey from simplicity to simplicity. Kavanagh dismissed it and from his viewpoint he was right to do so. But he was also wrong. The Great Hunger has a proud place in the larger story….

Patrick Kavanagh knew the meaning of poverty, and so he never tried to sentimentalize it. (pp. 164-65)

The Great Hunger is about a man who can trust nothing: not the gay imaginative God, nor life itself, nor men, nor women, nor his own heart and soul. Patrick Maguire is married to his fields and animals instead of to a woman. Dominated by his mother, servile to his Church, committed to his meadows, his life is a sad farce of slavish work, furtive masturbation, crude pretence, increasing mindlessness, decreasing manhood and the drab inevitable advance towards old age. The bitter irony of his existence is that he is devoted to a shocking self-deception that began in boyhood and can end only with his death.

In portraying the appalling life of this central, solitary figure, Kavanagh presents the two major tensions of the poem. There is first, the tension between Christianity and a fertile, pagan or completely natural world. (p. 166)

The second tension re-enforces the first. It is between the increasing impotence of Maguire's physical and spiritual being, and the irrepressible rebel bloom of the fields and meadows. (p. 167)

What Kavanagh insists on most of all in this poem is the appalling normality of Maguire's fate. Underlying the two tensions mentioned is the theme to which Kavanagh returns again and again, both by direct statement and by implication. This is Maguire's devouring sexual frustration, the agony he suffers from the 'impotent worm on his thigh'. Maguire is a tragic figure. He is a man who, sentenced to a horribly lingering death, is compelled to watch the natural world reproduce itself with spendthrift fertility while he shrivels into barren anonymity. (pp. 167-68)

The final picture of Maguire emphasizes his sheer emptiness. It is a frightening portrait of a man and his world utterly devoid of hope; and Kavanagh explicitly states that this is not simply a personal tragedy. The darkness and guilt touch everybody on the land…. (p. 168)

One of the most attractive things about Kavanagh's comic vision is his sense of the vulgarity of analysis. He disliked the assumption behind the work of many analysts, especially literary analysts, that whatever is analyzed can be totally known. Like Yeats, Kavanagh knew that nothing can be fully known, and the man who assumes it can is committing a crime against wonder, violating that sacred sense of mystery that is at the source of all poetry. We revert to his fundamental belief in a gay, imaginative God and understand why, in 'Pegasus' when he has offered his soul for sale to the Church, the State, 'the crooked shopkeepers' and the rowdy, bargaining tinkers, and nobody will have him, he realizes that nothing matters but his own freedom and the integrity of his imagination…. (p. 170)

For Kavanagh, at this stage, the rewards of this liberty are two-fold. First of all, his sense of wonder deepens, and his expression of it … becomes more assured….

The second reward for the liberated, independent imagination is a kind of savagery which is inextricably involved with the deepened sense of wonder. (pp. 170-71)

Kavanagh satirizes those events, people and ideas we would expect him to satirize: Dublin's pretentious poetasters, its bumptious 'intellectuals', its complacent middle-class, its vicious sentimentality and its 'insincere good-nature'. (pp. 171-72)

It becomes increasingly clear that Kavanagh is not really at home in satire. In a magnificent poem called 'Prelude' he shows his competence as a satirist and then proceeds to declare his sense of its inadequacy…. Ultimately, satire is for Kavanagh 'a desert that yields NO'. In a later poem, 'Living in the Country', he repeats his rejection of satire and informs us of his deeper intention:

    I protest here and now and forever
    On behalf of all my people who believe in Verse
    That my intention is not satire but humaneness….
                                                    (p. 174)

Satire falls away because it is not an enduring part of the comic vision. It is at best a necessary digression….

[As evidenced by his introduction to his Collected Poems,] Kavanagh has almost completed the journey from simplicity to simplicity. The angry protest of The Great Hunger is over; the sword of satire is blunted in his hand. He has achieved an ideal of vigilant passivity, a belief in poetry as a mystical, dangerous thing, a resolution to be at once humorous and humane. He sees the privileges and responsibilities of observation, has a profound understanding of the nature of love, and recognizes one of the most fascinating and complex subjects for poetry: poetry and the poet. Out of his life, his digressions, failures, sufferings, disappointments and triumphs, he has hammered a superbly lucid and rarefied poetry that is the pure product of the comic vision. (pp. 174-75)

[There is] 'a pure flame' of inspiration in a number of Kavanagh's later poems. There is also a certain amount of trivial verse which, on first reading, would appear not to have been written by the same man. Yet if we re-read bad poems such as 'A Summer Morning Walk' and 'Sensational Disclosures—Kavanagh Tells All' … we shall see that they have a certain lightness of touch and tone, but are completely devoid of any visionary impact…. There are times when Kavanagh writes as if he were somebody else imitating Kavanagh's originality, as though he were indulging in a frivolous parody of his own vision. (pp. 175-76)

At the very centre of [his comic vision] is that ideal of disinterest which Kavanagh expresses with perfect lucidity and authority in 'Intimate Parnassus'. This might be considered as Kavanagh's Defence of Poetry, a brilliantly compressed statement of poetic belief. Briefly, the poet is god-like in his detachment and is, in the deepest sense, indestructible…. Looking at suffering and strife, he must remain detached. Seeing men and women going about their daily business, he must be 'sympathetic'. (p. 177)

In that state of passive, steady observation the poet discovers a strong sufficiency. Here too he appreciates the nature of love and survival because, for the man who has a 'main purpose' and lives up to it, all things fall into sane perspective and acquire an individual meaning. In such a state, for example, the phenomenon of evil is not seen as hideous or terrifying, it is simply 'sad'; while, at the same time, seen from this divine vantage-point, it retains the capacity to be totally transfigured in the pure flame of comedy…. (pp. 177-78)

It is not at all surprising that Kavanagh writes about the mind of God. This is the focus of the comic vision. The attempt to understand God's mind, if rewarded with belief, is the truest source of comedy: it leads to detachment, and therefore to sanity, and therefore to the rare ability to see things as they are. (p. 179)

Kavanagh submits himself completely to the God who 'refuses to take failure for an answer'. At the deepest level of vison, Kavanagh himself refuses to take failure for an answer. And yet, paradoxically, Kavanagh did have a sense of failure, but true to character, he celebrated even that in his own inimitable way. 'If Ever You Go to Dublin Town' is a triumphant celebration of failure. In fact, it is not failure in any accepted sense of the word. It is, more accurately, a sense of not having fully accomplished what it was in him to do. But when one remembers what Kavanagh tried to do (and to a great extent actually did) one recognizes the great dignity of this sense of 'failure'…. (pp. 180-81)

But there are plain, technical reasons for this sense of 'failure'…. [His] is the dilemma of a poet who finds himself without a mythology. In the end, the internal world of the self needs the structure of myth to sustain it in poetry. Kavanagh never bothered to create a mythology. Indeed, the very purity of his comic vision means that the number of poems he wrote is fairly limited. He wrote about a dozen great poems. (p. 181)

The wonderful thing is that a sensitive reader coming from a study of Kavanagh's poems realizes that here is one of the greatest modern poets whose comic vision brought him through tragedy and suffering, whose passionate sincerity revealed itself in an insatiable hunger for reality…. (p. 182)

Brendan Kennelly, "Patrick Kavanagh," in Ariel (© A. Norman Jeffares and the University of Calgary, 1970), Vol. 1, No. 3, July, 1970 (and reprinted in Irish Poets in English: The Thomas Davis Lectures on Anglo-Irish Poetry, edited by Sean Lucy, The Mercier Press, 1973, pp. 159-84).