Kavanagh limited himself, it is true, to writing about himself only and the ways of life that formed him, although he extended his range somewhat in his journalism. But after Yeats and Joyce, immediately after them, perhaps self-limitation was the best course for an Irish writer, since the history of the human race, the nature of the unseen world, the possibilities of linguistic experiment, and what Kavanagh liked to call contemptuously "the Irish thing" all had been adequately covered. What was left? Daily life. Mud, stones, flowers, food, drink, faces, joy, sickness, hope, despair, spite, resentment, family, love, hate, and the occasional intimation of—something. No symbols anywhere. In "Is" (1958) Kavanagh wrote: "The only true teaching/Subsists in watching/Things moving or just colour/Without comment from the scholar." Kavanagh knew that it was difficult for a poet to get by without adopting some symbol or theory as his own: Yeats's masks and gyres. But he could not honestly find anything appropriate unless, as he once said half-facetiously, it was the magpie.

There are allusions aplenty, even the odd conundrum here and there in Kavanagh, but their context is the clay of Monaghan [his birthplace] and the streets of Dublin, not a literary copybook. Kavanagh tried to be parochial without being provincial, he wrote of the universal particular. "Parochialism and provincialism," Kavanagh used to say, "are direct opposites. A provincial is always trying to live by other people's loves, but a parochial is self-sufficient." Most Irish writing of this century, whatever its quality, has been aimed at foreign markets, produced as an exportable commodity, like beef or family crests. Irish writers, living in a colonial or post-colonial situation, have like their counterparts in other emerging nations tried to prove to themselves that they are human by gaining the respect and attention of their former colonial masters, even when their fear of inferiority is masked by patriotic rhetoric and reference, or when they appear to care little one way or the other about the colonizers. (pp. 13-14)

At worst this sort of post-colonial egoism makes for complacency and empty, defensive pride, as it did for the Irish Free State after 1927, with its censorship laws, designed as if to prove that Ireland had nothing to learn from the rest of the world. There is a touch of such complacency in Kavanagh…. But the weight of his writing falls against those of his countrymen who boasted of their insular Irishness, taking as their self-definition fantasies about Celtic blood, cultivating traits and poses designed, Kavanagh would say, by foreigners or by Irish writers desirous of pleasing foreigners. "I do not believe," wrote Kavanagh, "that there is any such thing as 'Irish' in literature." Joyce had said the same thing by making the hero of his Dublin epic a Jew.

Kavanagh's attitude to nationalism in literature was extreme and … at times inconsistent. But he was part of a general literary reaction against mythopoeic notions of Irishness…. Kavanagh loved ridiculing nationalist abstractions, and he had never been caught up in them, except as a youthful diversion. He was too aware of the hungers of daily existence for patriotism to do anything for his physical or spiritual digestion. (pp. 14-16)

Certain factors then ought to be kept in mind [when discussing] Kavanagh's verse. He was in revolt against fake nationalist sentiment and images, and he was, in his best work, concerned with capturing the poetry of ordinary life as he knew it. He tried to present this life bare, unadorned by received literary conventions or by flashy literary techniques. At the same time he often managed to get into his lines a spiritual quality that lifts them a little above mere matter. The nationalistic emphasis of much of the Literary Renaissance was abhorrent to him, but the spare, direct, personal style of Yeats's later work was an undoubted influence on him, as it has been on all recent Irish poets of any merit. He had no use for Joyce's ballet of rhetoric, styles and symbols, but Joyce the mimic of life was a continuous influence on Kavanagh…. (p. 17)

It must also be understood that Kavanagh's work is the product of a very low, dispirited period in Irish life and literature, the sort of psychological slump that most nations emerging from colonial rule experience after the revival of the past fails and people become aware that they have to make do with the rubble left behind by the departed conqueror…. By 1940, when Kavanagh began doing his best work, national independence was a reality but the vision had blacked out, and Ireland seemed to the most sensitive of her writers a dismal hole, its citizens becoming obsessed with ambitions of bourgeois respectability, isolated from the world by circumstances and by a perverse self-will…. Having seen the nationalist myths dissolve, disheartened by the values of the developing society, the better Irish writers had by 1940 turned caustically critical…. Kavanagh's most important single poem, The Great Hunger (1942), is an exegesis of the squalor of Irish country life. (pp. 18-19)

In 756 lines, divided into fourteen sections, the poem describes the life of Patrick Maguire, a small farmer…. [In] between the maddening, deadening details of country life, the stunted energies and hopes of people tethered to the land come across in concise images with great emotional impact. The Great Hunger has the power of a natural force, a flood or a drought.

I am not sure how to account for this natural force, it is so natural. Its rhythms are mostly those of common speech, often willing itself to rhyme, sounding sometimes vaguely ballad like, but on the whole deliberately flat, dreary, and irregular, with the hint of an Irish air or even a nursery rhyme in the meter. (pp. 20-1)

Kavanagh's Great Hunger is the spiritual, intellectual, and sexual hunger of the Irish countryman, who whatever else he lacks usually has enough to eat…. The tone of The Great Hunger ranges from somber to bitter, to wistful to futile, and it is more bitter than anything else. The glib and riotous peasants of Synge, the droll country wits of Lady Gregory, the hard-riding country gentlemen and romantic beggarmen of Yeats—all are absent. (p. 22)

Kavanagh was fond of calling the Literary Renaissance "a thoroughgoing English-bred lie." Certainly his idea of country truth has nothing of the Celtic Twilight about it. His Patrick Maguire is like a rural version of one of Joyce's paralyzed characters in Dubliners…. (p. 23)

The Great Hunger is tragedy without drama because Maguire never contests anything, has no energy to struggle. We are aware only of the hunger-ache in him, and it is only that which distinguishes him from the farm animals…. [It is hard to convey] the cumulative force of the poem [or] suggest the direct simplicity of its language and images and the unadorned authenticity of its detail. It is a didactic work…. At last, Patrick Maguire is not noble. Whatever dream or dignity he had in him the clay has choked. When finally he is underground and "The tongue in his mouth is the root of a yew," we know that he was dead long before he died anyway. (pp. 24-5)

Benedict Kiely has described The Green Fool, accurately, as being "as honest and unaffected and happy and humorous a book as any young poet ever wrote about himself." (p. 28)

[The Green Fool] has a mature, easy tone that Kavanagh was not to recapture for many years, and the savagery of The Great Hunger must have been born in part out of his literary frustrations. In the course of describing the blossoming of a poetic soul The Green Fool touches on countless details of country life that are of anthropological as well as literary interest. (pp. 29-30)

In The Green Fool, as later in Tarry Flynn, the character and the characters of Inniskeen come across as so varied and so intense that one looks on in fascination and with little enough of either approval or disgust…. Certainly Kavanagh does not spare himself from humorous treatment, as when he describes how he taunted the son of the Protestant sexton and then ran for his life from the wrath of the boy's father. Everyone seems to get his due, and no more.

There is nothing stage-Irish here, the observations are too precise for that. We get a sharply focused picture of a specific region and proof that there are not one or two but hundreds of Irelands tucked away among low hills or high mountains, black-soiled valleys or white-stoned coasts; a country as yet unhomogenized by the mass media; a place where crossing a stream can bring a change of accent and custom. (p. 32)

His mixed emotions about finally departing Inniskeen are crystallized in Tarry Flynn…. (p. 39)

It covers much of the same ground as The Green Fool…. Aesthetically it is superior to the earlier work, more humorous, tighter, and more coherent by virtue of its controlling theme, the inevitable departure from the countryside of its young poethero Tarry. (pp. 39-40)

Kavanagh leaves us at last with the pain of uprooting and the beauty of what Tarry loves. No bitterness, no resentment at the stony grey soil, only sadness and confusion at the power of home and the urge to leave it. (p. 40)

[Throughout his early years in Dublin Kavanagh] kept on with his verse and became an active giver and receiver of what Yeats called "The daily spite of this unmannerly town."

In those days the Palace Bar in Fleet Street was the center of literary activity or at least talk…. Here Kavanagh's satirical verse was spawned. (p. 42)

At first Kavanagh concealed in verse if not in speech his contempt for this and related Dublin scenes, turning instead against Monaghan as a way of trying to shake the clay from his boots. But he was never absorbed into this society, though he became important to it as a character, a tolerated scourge. He acquired a reputation as a wild and eccentric poet, mostly because of his bluntness—"I don't know you and I don't want to know you"—and the aggressive, controversial nature of his reviews, which attacked the general level of taste in the country. It was a way of calling attention to himself, and it worked, not entirely to his advantage, because it enabled people to pigeonhole him as an oddity, a green fool. (p. 43)

He became known and he knew people, but it was lonely. In a way he occupied the outsider's place in Dublin that he had in Inniskeen, but without home comforts and land comforts. His anger at the city broke into verse [in "The Jungle" (1948).]… (pp. 43-4)

The hate runs on uncontrolled in "The Jungle," but in other poems Kavanagh leashes hate to irony and the satiric knife cuts deeper, cleaner…. [In "The Defeated" (1951), in] the plain, conversational style of which he was becoming a master, Kavanagh catches the envious defensiveness of the provincial capital and implies his place in it. His satire has this in common with his lyrical verse, that it requires no formal exegesis, only an ear. To damn each hog or praise each violet straight to its face was his way.

To him the Dublin writers were most of them frauds and bores trying to capitalize on "the Irish thing" and doing their best to diminish and exclude the genuine article, Kavanagh. "The Paddiad" (1949), inspired by Pope's "Dunciad," makes fatuous the writers of Catholic novels, pious verse, Tourist Board pap disguised as poetry…. Celtic Mist, Connemara West, and Frog are based on three writers Kavanagh held in especially low regard: Austin Clarke (a generally admired and prolific poet), Roibeard O'Farachain (novelist and poet), and M. J. McManus (literary editor of the Irish Press). Or so Kavanagh named them in a letter to his brother, but they are recognizable types and could represent any number of people. "The Paddiad" mocks the backscratching, self-perpetuating apparatus of Irish letters. The devil appears as patron of the Paddies…. (pp. 44-6)

In "Adventures in the Bohemian Jungle," a verse play,… Kavanagh takes on the entire Dublin art world, literature, theater, painting, music, all tightly bound to commerce. The scene combines the nighttown episode of Ulysses, the Inferno, and Pilgrim's Progress. Kavanagh appears as the simple Countryman, full of love, believer in the power of poets, bewildered by this temple of the Muses, which is nothing more than a drunken party. (p. 46)

Kavanagh wrote many poems in this vein, often appearing himself in the role of naïf or indignant truth-teller. They were worthy efforts, slashingly funny, but one can keep at such stuff only so long. It is the sort of satire that has behind it a reforming urge, a messianic impulse, and when poem after poem would appear in newspaper or little magazine, raise a few titters, cause people to say the equivalent of "Kavanagh's done it again, what a droll fellow, I understand he is unkempt and drinks to excess, clever writer though, a genius, surely, or near-genius," and disappear down the rat hole of notoriety—when this would happen again and again, Kavanagh felt wasted, empty, a failure. And often, when he was not writing satire, he would write about failure…. ["Portrait of the Artist" (1951)] expresses contempt for popular standards of success but also Kavanagh's cold misery at feeling unrecognized. (p. 48)

Kavanagh's progress, if that is the right word, reminds me of Samuel Beckett's many-named hero, Murphy-Watt-Molloy-Moran-Malone-Unnamable, who after years of searching, cursing, hating, wondering, wandering, loses his last possessions, confronts death, casts off his selves and self-fictions and gives himself up to pure contemplation of the space around him; Kavanagh wifeless, curling up sometimes in basements, slopping about Dublin "dishevelled with shoes untied," taken as one thing by onlookers while a contradictory poetic universe whirled in his head, confronts death and achieves for a moment equilibrium in poetry that contemplates whatever corner he finds himself occupying. (p. 57)

On March 31, 1955, Kavanagh was operated on for cancer of the lung. The lung was removed. Unaccountably he recovered completely…. [Barely] eluding death had a serious and positive effect on his poetry. It was after this that he wrote three or four of his finest lyrics, permanent ones, I think, that will with The Great Hunger make his monument. Kavanagh himself thought that he had not become a poet until after his illness, and while the judgment is too narrow, it has its truth. His sickness deprived him of a lung and of much hatred, or let us say that the trauma of his cancer made the targets of his hatred seem as petty as they were and as unworthy of his continuous attention. In "The Hospital" (1956) he wrote of love…. Simple, original, moving; a return to the naming and praising of his early verse but without gush or awe-struck pose; the language common as the subject. Kavanagh's love is that of disinterested (selfless, if you like) appreciation. It was that way with women, too, for at least from the evidence of his poems his love was rarely requited. Love is pursued, missed, remembered…. "On Raglan Road" is typical of Kavanagh's love poetry in theme even if he varied his language and form over the years…. But if women, like fame, eluded him, he felt after his illness that he was free to love without bitterness those things of which he asked nothing but their existence: the natural world, man-made objects acted on by nature and by time, even women when they were out of reach in memory or fancy…. Poetry had become all. As in "The Hospital," naming is the love-act. Poetry is not one activity in life, it is life itself, the lover's means of seeing and feeling, letting the gods commingle, out-of-sense, unreasonable.

"That a poet is born, not made, is well known," Kavanagh said in 1963 in a "Self-Portrait" broadcast over Irish television…. Kavanagh felt that in order to achieve … the simplicity of return, he had had to reach a position of what he called "not caring." By this he did not mean cynicism but acceptance of his or any other man's humble place in the world, which would spin regardless of him but which was worth observing and capturing in words, whatever the effect, whatever the consequence, the likelihood being that there would be none. Not caring, "we don't care whether we appear foolish or not. We talk of things that earlier would embarrass. We are satisfied with being ourselves, however small. So it was that on the banks of the Grand Canal between Baggot and Leeson Street bridges in the warm summer of 1955, I lay and watched the green waters of the canal. I had just come out of hospital." Three years later he was able to write of "Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal/Pouring redemption for me, that I do/The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,…. ("Canal Bank Walk," 1958)." This was the first of several canal bank poems celebrating the grass and water running across the south side of Dublin…. The greatest of his canal bank poems is "Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin, 'Erected to the Memory of Mrs. Dermot O'Brien'" (1958)…. (pp. 58-61)

Kavanagh got rid of a great deal in order to accomplish this sonnet: self-righteousness, self-pity, the temptation to take himself rather than life seriously. He had always insisted on realism, scorning writers who falsified life, but here, as he commented in 1959, he brought about "the final fusion of all crudeness into a pure flame." It is a religious conception of poetry, the poet as priest, language the transubstantiating power. The poem seems borne on the ambient air it describes. Its technique, while unobtrusive, has much to do with its success and is made possible by the new self-confidence that somehow came to Kavanagh after fifty years of age. The rhyme, for example, [is audacious]…. The effect is to make the poem's intensity seem off hand, bottled-up but escaping with graceful pressure, a backhanded catch, the favorite winning by an easy neck.

Writing about ecstasy has its perils. Joyce's celebrated epiphany, the beach scene in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, tastes like trifle today, thought it is possible Joyce intended it as an example of how not to describe visionary experience. The later Yeats provided Kavanagh with a better model in "Vacillation" where the dull, off-hand phrase "twenty minutes more or less" makes the ecstasy of "my body of a sudden blazed" believable and affecting. Getting the mood into words, it was essential to convey a mundane setting in colloquial language—Yeats's shop, cup, and table-top, Kavanagh's banal canal-bank seat.

"The mark of the poet is his lightness, the pure personality revealed bare in all its volatility and with the gaiety that is of God…." So Kavanagh said lecturing at University College, Dublin, in 1956. He quoted St. Augustine: "I am conscious of something within me that plays before my soul and is as a light dancing in front of me. Were this brought to steadiness and perfection in me it would surely be eternal light." The mystical impulse had been with him from the start but not until 1956, and with greatest effect in 1958, was he able to "record love's mystery without claptrap" not here and there in an isolated verse but with a fair consistency. These later poems are the sequel to Tarry Flynn: the poet departed, travels the road of hate into the city of love and light. In poetry, at least, and if it is possible to separate Kavanagh's life from his work, it must be said that work gave him what life never could. There was too much desperation in him for personal happiness. (pp. 62-3)

For Kavanagh the moment, "the passionate transitory," was always the true poetic subject. The difficulty was in clearing away the claptrap. Violent rejection was a start but, as we have noted, nay-saying such as that of The Great Hunger carries with it its own distortions. And one of the difficulties Kavanagh faced was that he loved Ireland, not as an abstraction but as specific hills, faces, and phrases, fiercely. The objective world and the mystery emanating from it moved and attracted him, even as the falsifying of that world repelled him or made him laugh. As for the self, or that old nag the soul, he became free and most eloquent when he ceased caring about it. The mystic tries to lose his self in the Other or the One. Kavanagh had his own modest sort of mysticism, losing himself in the Many, a hedge, a hill, a bridge, people, specified and reformed into a poem…. (p. 66)

Darcy O'Brien, in his Patrick Kavanagh (© 1975 by Associated University Presses, Inc.), Bucknell University Press, 1975, 72 p.