[Patrick Kavanagh's "Collected Poems" show him to be] the strongest poet to have come of age in Ireland under the inhibiting shadow of Yeats…. A poor peasant, he was reared … in "the stony grey soil of Monaghan," on a 16-acre hill-farm…. [The theme of "The Great Hunger"] is not the Irish potato famine, but famine in man's soul and frustration in his body. The central image is an unmarried peasant tethered to the clay by his mother, respectable and loveless. Kavanagh now says that he dislikes the poem because "Tragedy is underdeveloped Comedy, not fully born," but he wrote it with humor and compassion. He created an Everyman of the Irish countryside, a moral poem where each part fits accurately together, the story beautifully narrated with a rhythm that responds to shifts of mood…. The sharp details of this great work contribute to a terrible and moving image of human frustration.

When Kavanagh himself fled from the clay, he went to live in Dublin, where his life has become a legend of comedy, to which at times his poems have seemed like dogged footnotes. For example, "The Paddiad" is a roistering lampoon on the Dublin literary scene, set of course in a pub. But Kavanagh in Dublin is not a match for her native sons in the satirical game. Austin Clarke has a finer cutting edge to his voice, and a more exact knowledge of the thing he wishes to cut. In a spirit of Irish fun, Kavanagh seems for a while to have betrayed his talents.

Then, after an illness …, he enjoyed a period of clarity regained, in which he wrote several poems in an extended sonnet form. With a longer flowing rhythmical line that supersedes its metrical origins, the voice of his own personality speaks. These beautiful poems are the most positive work he has done. Where "The Great Hunger" is a narrative tragedy of love's frustration by man, the later group of sonnets is a lyrical celebration of love fulfilled in man by God. The matter of the sonnets is still the clay of ordinary human affairs, but where in the earlier poem his love of the clay destroys the hero, in the sonnets both clay and mankind are redeemed by love….