In Patrick Kavanagh peasant Ireland has a poet. But "peasant Ireland" needs an explanation.

Perhaps there are some readers of this critique who can recall an early poem of Yeats's—"Song of the Old Mother."… One feels that the old mother is aware that all she does has been done for generations, and that there is something over and above hardship in her doing of them—felt custom and felt community are in what she does. What she says goes to a traditional lilt in the verse and there is little effectiveness in it. But this awareness of custom and community is fading in the Irish countryside and the poets of today have little support in the pieties that meant so much in the days of W. B. Yeats and Douglas Hyde. The older poets took their matter from a folk; today's poets take theirs from the individual peasant.

Patrick Kavanagh writes under this new dispensation. His verse has no longer a traditional lilt with the overtones of folk-poetry: again and again we catch a rhythm that recalls "The Waste Land." But "A Soul for Sale" is of the Irish countryside, and its figures are recognizable as the farmers and priests, the boys and girls of a parish. He mints phrases that bring the countryside and the people to us…. The poet, remembering the sentimental treatment of Irish country people by certain poets is determined to be hard and disillusioned. But he goes too far in this recoil from sentimentality. It's all very well to demolish Tom Moore as an Irish poet as he does in "A Wreath for Tom Moore's Statue," but it is absurd to denounce Tom Moore in the terms that Patrick Kavanagh uses….

Perhaps it is because he belongs to a transition period that this poet is so unequal: Patrick Kavanagh has not made up his mind whether he should celebrate or satirize. In "The Great Hunger" he attempts to give monumental treatment to the peasant. But he also wants to satirize the joylessness of the countryside: to do this he has to give his Pat Maguire an extra raw deal by giving him a vinegary sister as well as a dominating mother. When Patrick Kavanagh is wholehearted he writes poems that have the tang of sloes pulled off the bushes—"Pegasus," "Father Mat," "Blue Bells for Love," "A Christmas Childhood," "In Memory of My Father," "Art McCooey," "Spraying the Potatoes" are such poems.

Padraic Colum, "The Tang of Sloes," in The Saturday Review of Literature (copyright © 1947 by Saturday Review; copyright renewed © 1975 by Saturday Review; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission), Vol. XXX, No. 38, September 20, 1947, p. 24.