Mr. Patrick Kavanagh, who is about the same age as Mr. [Louis] MacNeice and Mr. [W. H.] Auden, is generally thought of by the better judges among his countrymen as the best Irish poet since Yeats. He is unlike Yeats in his origins, a peasant and a man of Roman Catholic formation, unlike him also in being a love poet whose love is directed to outer nature rather than to women, who eschews heroic gestures, and whose love of nature is a little like that of [Gerard Manley] Hopkins, an outpouring of gratitude to the God whom he sees everywhere in nature, not only in nature where it is strikingly beautiful. He is a bachelor, his poems tell us, a poor man, a man who has suffered from illness and who has sometimes wished that his life might be more intense or dramatic, but who is saved from desperation by an incurable grace, his gift of loving and finding happiness in ordinary things….

So unlike the grand self-dramatizings of Yeats, [the] poems by Mr. Kavanagh [in Come Dance with Kitty stobling] have something in them of Wordsworth's "wise passivity"; he sees the main purpose of poetry as to be "passive, observing with a steady eye", or, after sighing a little for the undramatic nature of his poetry and his life, he adjures himself:

            So be reposed and praise, praise praise
            The way it happened and the way
                                        it is.

Mr. Kavanagh, however, is not an Irishman for nothing, and this book contains also a sprightly satire on a small country's cult of the small poet,… a cuttingly amusing little poem about a party to celebrate (possibly) one of Miss Honor Tracy's Voltairean skits on the Irish clergy, and even in straight poems some fine flashes of Irish wit and fantasy….

The humour, the self-irony, give a complexity and richness to what otherwise would be a straight Hopkinsian or Wordsworthian response….

[Here] is a poet of striking talent, and of unusually likable and honest poetic personality. Nor can Mr. Kavanagh be dismissed as a simple, pious peasant from a backward country; the diction and the movement of the … book as a whole, show a cunning dexterity and a high sophistication, in the good sense of that word. Under the mask of ease, diffidence, the digressive offhand manner, the poet murmuring half grumblingly to himself, there is a notable confident skill.