FOUL IS FAIR: LYRICS 1939–1942

Inniskeen is a mere sixty miles or so from Dublin; for the twenty-seven-year-old poet [Kavanagh] it was even within walking distance. However, the literary importance of Kavanagh's exile, the imaginative mileage he got out of it, is utterly disproportionate to the facts of geographical distance. His migration from Inniskeen was pivotal in his writings for almost a decade, approached from different angles in different poems and, in addition, providing the fictional climax of his novel, Tarry Flynn. When the older poet looked back over his literary career in his last great creative phase he summarised it as a circuitous progress from Monaghan to Dublin's Grand Canal, and in his Self-Portrait, published three years before his death, he was still pondering the repercussions of deracination. Metaphorical projection of his life as a journey, pilgrimage, exodus or hegira, was the most enduring of Kavanagh's personal myths. The ‘pain of roots dragging up’ proved the most traumatic emotional experience of his life for the farmer-poet whose love affair with places was as intense as other men's sexual passions. Where Tennyson was imaginatively energised by the death of Arthur Hallam and Hardy by the death of his wife, Emma, the severing of a thirty-five year attachment to home was the painful pressure that finally released the poet in Kavanagh. For all three it was better to have loved and lost than not to have lost at all.

Kavanagh actually compared himself in his early years away from Inniskeen to one who had suffered a bereavement, wanting to banish grief-provoking memories at first, but soon consoling himself by constructing mental ‘pictures of the past’.² Exile and elegy are associated, in fact, in one of his late 1939 poems, ‘Memory of My Father’.³ The poet's father had died ten years previously but the sundering of his primal bond with home probably reactivated the trauma of being orphaned. Whereas in ‘Poplar Memory’ the father was situated in familiar surroundings, a fertile patriarch, in ‘Memory of My Father’ he is translated from harvest fields to city streets and appears an elderly, enfeebled figure, incapable of offering paternal protection or support:

Every old man I see
Reminds me of my father
When he had fallen in love with death
One time when sheaves were gathered.
That man I saw in Gardner Street
Stumble on the kerb was one,
He stared at me half-eyed,
I might have been his son.
And I remember the musician
Faltering over his fiddle
In Bayswater, London,
He too set me the riddle.
Every old man I see
In October-coloured weather
Seems to say to me:
‘I was once your father.’

The poet's father haunts the poem through rhyme and assonance, as well as through image. Even its Dublin and London place-names were probably selected for their assonantal associations, and the last line of the first stanza was revised from ‘Ten years ago in Monaghan’ for the sake of the rhyme, as much as for the poignant harvest image. Kavanagh's father had died in August yet his presence is recalled in ‘October-coloured weather’, an impressionistic phrase that exploits the traditional mournful connotations of autumn and also resonates with ‘old’. Not only is imagery of home transferred to city pavements in this poem, but the displaced psyche senses a kinship with ailing and vulnerable male figures. Whether the ‘half-eyed’ stare of the Inniskeen spectre is kindly or reproachful is not recounted. When he finally speaks it is to affirm his parental role, yet simultaneously to relegate it to the past. Nevertheless, this poem performs no rite of exorcism; it raises ghosts rather than lays them. It is both a valediction to a disavowed heritage and a testimony to its continually reasserted presence.

Exile stimulated that poetic definition of his relationship to Inniskeen in which Kavanagh had already sporadically engaged in ‘Inniskeen Road’ and ‘Shancoduff’. When he first arrived in Dublin he had ‘no system, no plan’. His subject discovered him, obsessed him, overwhelmed him. Inniskeen images came teeming and tumbling in, crowding out the present scene, compelling him to expand beyond rhymed quatrains into the more generous latitudes of long narrative poems and novels. Some he could not immediately accommodate and they sprawled beyond the story line of ‘Why Sorrow?’

In The Green Fool Kavanagh had frequently belied his own ground; falsifying his perceptions so that they would conform with accepted views of Irish rusticity, selecting and presenting images and scenes in accordance with established aesthetic criteria. Paradoxically, it may have been his very success in adhering to prescribed formulae in The Green Fool that allowed him to break with literary precedent. On all sides his peasant proprietorship was now acknowledged: in Ireland there was no one to challenge his patrimony; in England his status as a latterday Robbie Burns was assured. Relieved of the need to establish his credentials he no longer felt obliged to conform to existing models of peasant literature; he had earned the right to stand his own ground and dictate his own terms. In The Green Fool he was still an apprentice writer fulfilling his first commission; now he could rework the same terrain as a free-lance artist. A recognised authority on peasant Ireland, he was at liberty to discard others' versions of pastoral. Though he quickly developed into an iconoclast, it was as an image-maker that Kavanagh set out.

Personal deracination from his ‘dear, perpetual place’ served to root his imagination all the more firmly there; for the first time his poetry was continuously localised. This ‘return in Departure’ went beyond the merely scenic or descriptive. What Kavanagh was attempting to write was a love-poetry about a place and its way of life. Later, he would observe that ‘roots in the soil’ did not mean knowledge of ‘people living close to nature, struggling for survival on the small farm’:

Real roots lie in our capacity for love and its abandon. The material itself has no special value; it is what our imagination and our love does to it …⁴

Though he was too immersed in his new subject to arrive at such a formulation in the early 1940s, it defines what he was attempting to achieve in these years, a local poetry indelibly marked by the passionate commitment that had led to its conception. He was seeking out forms and rhythms which would not only make a previously disregarded locality visible and audible, but would also communicate a sense of it as a place intimately known and intimately loved or loathed.

He resorted to a combination of personification and apostrophe to pay court to and to part company with his native place in the paired poems, ‘Kednaminsha’ and ‘Stony Grey Soil’.⁵ Such rhetoric was calculated to convey a personal relationship with place; unfortunately, it was not conducive to descriptive particularity. The sonnet, ‘Kednaminsha’, begins flirtatiously yet no clear picture of this artfully dressed place emerges:

You wore a heather jumper then,
A hat of cloud and on your feet
Shoes made by craft-gods out of peat …

The retrospective Romantic mode, which allowed for a partnership between realist evocation and subjective ‘emotion recollected’, was the mode Kavanagh most often turned to in his short early forties' lyrics, most of which include an explicit reference to their own retrospectiveness:

Like this my memory saw …
Yet I recall …
In the glass of memory plain can see …
I recover now the time …
Remembering the lime and copper smell …
          Now and then
I can remember something …

Place is here inseparable from autobiographical association; unavoidably personalised rather than personified. Such poetry relies for its innovativeness on the realisation of local particularity and/or on the characterisation of the first-person narrator. What Kavanagh tends to emphasise are local individuality and the transformative powers of the endeared imagination. Nomenclature plays a significant part in this poetry: personal names, place-names, names of familiar objects. Naming serves an introductory function, acquainting the reader with a neighbourhood and its way of life. More importantly, however, for Kavanagh, naming is also a poetic rite of intimate intercourse.

His first-person narrator is distinguished by his attraction to ugly or ordinary aspects of country living, to what literary convention had dismissed as poetically unworthy. The disfigured bones of his subjects usually gape through the figurative clothing that adorns them; homely metonyms are revealed both naked and metaphorised. Readers are made aware, as in ‘Shancoduff’, that intrinsically unpoetic material is being glamourised; that what matters is less the material than what imagination and love do to it.

This defiant, unconventional love affair with the objects of others' scorn draws attention to its own novelty and unorthodoxy, to the individuality of its narrator's perceptions. It is both sophisticatedly knowing, and innocent. Kavanagh combines plain honesty with gorgeous or elevating fancy; the realist and figurative dimensions of his narratives remain in tension. This is a poetry that succeeds in annexing a new terrain for Irish verse by adapting the Romantic mode at a time when English poetry was, itself, espousing impersonality and turning for new subject matter to the urban, the industrial and the political. Kavanagh's country poetry consciously addresses neglected and deprived areas of Irish experience. When not subversive of Romantic ruralism it is a deliberately interlinear poetry, positioning itself in textual spaces left vacant by English Romanticism or by the Irish Literary Revival's cult of the peasant. Its ‘common people’ inhabit:

The unwritten spaces between the lines …(6)

‘Christmas Eve Remembered’, Kavanagh's earliest re-creation of his own parish, published the Christmas after his arrival in Dublin in 1939,⁷ is not altogether successful:

I see them going to the chapel
To confess their sins; Christmas Eve
In a parish in Monaghan.
Poor parish! and yet memory does weave
For me about those folk
A romantic cloak.
No snow, but in their minds
The fields and roads are white;
They may be talking of the turkey markets
Or foreign politics, but to-night
Their plain hard country words
Are Christ's singing birds.
Bicycles scoot by; old women
Cling to the grass margin:
Their feet are heavy but their minds fly
In dreams of the Mother Virgin
For One in Bethlehem
Has kept their dreams safe for them.
‘Did you hear from Tom this Christmas?’
‘These are the dark days’.
‘Maguire's shop did a great trade,
Turnover double—so Maguire says.’
‘I can't delay now, Jem
Lest I be late in Bethlehem’ …

The impulse to present both an impoverished, realist picture of Inniskeen and an imaginative transformation of the same unpromising subject matter is evident here. While the realist dimension is well represented through visualisation and dialogue, the transformational dimension is defensive, sentimentalised and extrinsic, ‘a romantic cloak’. One reason for this imaginative failure is the choice of a detached narrator, a commentator and interpreter, who maintains a distance from his material, condescends to it, confers a somewhat egotistical significance on it:

Like this my memory saw,
Like this my childhood heard …

In his next Christmas poem, ‘A Christmas Childhood’, Kavanagh solved the problem of combining contrary perspectives by presenting country life from a child's viewpoint. Instead of serving as a generalised symbol of prelapsarian rural innocence, childhood is now invoked to provide a dual perspective on the limited world of home and townland, a foreshortened and uncontaminated awareness, accompanied by a transfiguring vision achieved through simple Christian faith. However, the introductory section of ‘A Christmas Childhood’, first published as an independent piece, is not an entirely happy addition to the poem.⁸ It includes some remarkable instances of Kavanagh's use of childhood perception to transform the mundane into the marvellous:

The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place,
A green stone lying sideways in a ditch
Or any common sight the transfigured face
Of a beauty that the world did not touch.

“Again”

Yet, despite such ‘wonderful’ and ‘magical’ rural images, an adult narrator bewailing the loss off his childhood Eden is an obtrusive presence, unnecessarily justifying these glimpses

                                                                                of the gay
Garden that was childhood's …

Like ‘Christmas Eve Remembered’, the second part of ‘A Christmas Childhood’ compares an Irish parish with Bethlehem, but here the religious metaphor is incarnated in the poem's realist texture. Originally, this second part was a separate poem, showing ‘the wonder of a Christmas townland’ through the eyes and ears of a six-year-old child:

My father played the melodeon
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.
Across the wild bogs his melodeon called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.
Outside in the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle …

An atmosphere of childhood excitement pervades this Christmas poem. Despite the past tense it retains an air of unmediated naïveté and reads like the unaided effort of ‘my child poet’. Detail is picked out with a crisp, frosty clarity; yet the apparent arbitrariness of its ordering, the limpid simplicity of the spoken language, the brief quatrains with their unobtrusive assonantal rhymes, sustain the illusion of childhood experience. The poem radiates outwards from a domestic interior to gate, cowshed, road, bogland, neighbourhood, townland; a world awakening to music. Its child poet, inscribing on frost-silvered stone or making his mark on the doorpost, will inherit the rural rhythms of his parents. This child's perspective is that of the insider, completely at home, familiar with the people and places of his small world. Since a townland is the boundary of the known universe to him he accommodates the exotic to the local, associates the name and position of a distant star with a neighbour's surname and farm:

Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy's hanging hill …

(The two near homonyms are also confused through the linear division of ‘overhanging’).

This poem's transfiguration of an ordinary townland into Bethlehem is not laboured, and the conflation of stable, star and wise kings with the homely and local images of cow house, stable lamp and whin bushes is credible as the fantasy of an Irish Catholic child reared on the Christmas story. The numinous is here offset by comedy: a humorously affectionate glimpse of the six year old dressed in his Sunday best, skulking shyly in the doorway, proud of his adult penknife with its blade for cutting tobacco. ‘A Christmas Childhood’ ends with a harmonious family triptych:

My father played the melodeon,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary's blouse.

The only full rhyme occurs in this last stanza, linking the mother figure with the Virgin Mary, ordinary farmyard chores with religion, a commonplace happening with an image of emotional fulfilment. Music modulates into prayer. Yet the unexpected flowering at the close of this poem is a sudden incarnational miracle that brings heaven down to earth, transforms the Virgin into a village sweetheart, and with a chastely sexual flourish, half out of fairy-tale, half out of country courtship, turns a delicately poised lyric into a simple and beautiful Christmas gift.

‘The Long Garden’ (December 1941)⁹ draws on the inventive make-believe element in childhood play to metamorphose the ordinary and the ugly into the rich and strange. A long garden, bounded by thistly hedges, shared with farm animals and full of household rubbish, is transformed by childhood imagination into the Hesperides, thereby suggesting a connection between childish fantasy and adult mythmaking:

It was the garden of the golden apples,
A long garden between a railway and a road,
In the sow's rooting where the hen scratches
We dipped our fingers in the pockets of God.
In the thistly hedge old boots were flying sandals
By which we travelled through the childhood skies,
Old buckets rusty-holed with half-hung handles
Were drums to play when old men married wives.

Adult wish-fulfilment obtrudes awkwardly, however, in the lines

The racing cyclists' gasp-gapped reports
Hinted of pubs where life can drink his fill …

Although childhood country in this poem is the poet's own, identifiable through a series of local references, details are accumulated less for evocative than for doctrinaire purposes. This is a schematic poem where Kavanagh is intent on underlining the disparity between the real and the imagined to show what can be made of the most unpretentious subject matter. Substitution of plural for singular, first-person narration increases the effect of generalisation. While it offers some vividly realised images of a materially impoverished and fantastically rich rural childhood, ‘The Long Garden’, which was extracted from the unfinished sprawl of ‘Why Sorrow?’,¹⁰ is spoiled by its formulaic and rhythmic predictability.

From the beginning Kavanagh's autobiographical rural verse tended towards reflexiveness. In ‘Spraying the Potatoes’ and ‘Art McCooey’ it is even programmatically local.¹¹ What happens in Inniskeen fields is now ‘stuff for the Muses’. ‘Spraying the Potatoes’ is based on the recollection of a specific farming occasion, and the urban present, adverted to only briefly and negatively in the last stanza, is immediately overwhelmed by the magic of the past.

The barrels of blue potato-spray
Stood on a headland of July
Beside an orchard wall where roses
Were young girls hanging from the sky.
The flocks of green potato-stalks
Were blossom spread for sudden flight,
The Kerr's Pinks in a frivelled blue,
The Arran Banners wearing white.
And over that potato-field
A lazy veil of woven sun.
Dandelions growing on headlands, showing
Their unloved hearts to everyone.
And I was there with the knapsack sprayer
On the barrel's edge poised. A wasp was floating
Dead on a sunken briar leaf
Over a copper-poisoned ocean …

The poem opens flatly and prosaically. An ordinary farming chore, which might seem peculiarly resistant to lyricisation, is being appropriated for poetry. ‘Spraying the Potatoes’ soon blossoms into a colourful, sensuous, almost erotic, evocation of a warm July day on the farm, a lyric which anticipates a poetics formalised in the mid-1950s:

… nothing whatever is by love debarred
The common and banal her heat can know …(12)

The farmer-poet's lost potato fields are provocatively titivated and memory beckons with a come-hither look. His attitude is amorous; the poem is ‘in heat’. This sexual undertow, charging recollection with excitement, is mediated through weather images, metaphor and narrative transference: noontime warmth, a tropical becalmment; roses personified as dallying girls peeping over a wall; potato stalks decorated with feminine fripperies; dandelions in the pathetically expectant role of wallflowers; reminiscence about cornfield courtship displaced on to an old man. That transitional metaphor

The axle-roll of a rut-locked cart
Broke the burnt stick of noon in two …

so descriptively evocative, slow paced, hot, and slyly sexual, is a paradigmatic turning point. Afterwards tension winds down, the experience gradually slips out of focus and dialogue disappears into vaguely celebratory phrases, ‘a theme of kings, / A theme for strings’.

The concluding stanza combines the programmatic with the sensuous:

And poet lost to potato-fields,
Remembering the lime and copper smell
Of the spraying barrels he is not lost
Or till blossomed stalks cannot weave a spell.

Here the word ‘lost’ is pivotal, advanced in the first line, withdrawn in the third. An elegiac mood is summoned only to be dismissed as Kavanagh confidently proclaims that personal loss has paradoxically resulted in imaginative gain, that he has now found his bearings as an autobiographical poet.

‘Art McCooey’ confirms this finding. It is a manifesto poem which, under the guise of rural reminiscence, explains the literary importance of Kavanagh's Inniskeen period. Here he has chosen as his ostensible subject a farming chore even less prepossessing than spraying potatoes, carting dung:

I recover now the time I drove
Cart-loads of dung to an outlying farm—
My foreign possessions in Shancoduff—
With the enthusiasm of a man who sees life simply.
The steam rising from the load is still
Warm enough to thaw my frosty fingers.
In Donnybrook in Dublin ten years later
I see that empire now and the empire builder …

‘Art McCooey’ begins urbanely: an older poet's benign amusement at his younger self, rendered in comically inflated images; simplicity mediated through experienced narration. Affectionate humour also plays over the poem's subsequent recollections, misleading the reader into underestimating its ultimate seriousness. This is the work of a poet who has come to terms with his local subject matter and is completely at his ease. The younger self portrayed here is a small farmer, whose horizons, like those of ‘my child poet’ in ‘A Christmas Childhood’, are bounded by his parish. His talk is of local scandals; he can name the owner of every house and field; he is interested in the trivia of neighbours' lives, can identify a man's shout, tell the time by the distant laughter of children just released from school; his speech is flavoured with localisms like ‘Brave and cool’ or ‘wangel’; he looks ahead only as far as teatime or the chat after second Mass on Sunday; his day ends with the sordid business of cleaning out the dung cart. The embryonic poet is presented as an ordinary country lad, registering his local milieu unawares, not realising that here is life and food for future years. He is still in the preconscious, pre-natal phase of his poetic formation:

Wash out the cart with a bucket of water and a wangel
Of wheaten straw. Jupiter looks down.
Unlearnedly and unreasonably poetry is shaped
Awkwardly but alive in the unmeasured womb.

This concluding stanza exploits the shock-value of having the president of the Immortals oversee the sordid business of cleaning out a dung cart. The dialect word, ‘wangel’, is deliberately juxtaposed with Jupiter, a meeting of the local and the universal, the ‘thick-tongued’ and the classical. Two years after his arrival in Dublin, Kavanagh, in ‘Art McCooey’, is distancing himself by a decade from his rural past and fashioning a Romantic myth about his own poetic formation which emphasises the ordinary, the ugly and the comic aspects of his early experience. What the myth stresses is the unlikelihood of his translation from farmer into poet. A slow and painful process of autodidacticism is erased at a stroke in the phrase, ‘unlearnedly and unreasonably’; whom the gods love cart dung. In later life Kavanagh claimed that he had been born as a poet on the banks of the Grand Canal in 1955, but the poetry testifies to an earlier Dublin birth in 1940. Implicit in ‘Art McCooey's’ concluding metaphor of gestation is the recognition that the farmer-poet is now delivering the verse conceived and nurtured in his foolish Inniskeen years.

‘Art McCooey’ offers a myth of cultural as well as personal poetic origins. On Kavanagh's ancestral stair we encounter not ‘Goldsmith and the Dean, Berkeley and Burke’, but an eighteenth-century Irish Catholic poet of small-farming stock. Art McCooey, ‘Art of the Songs’, who hailed from the parish of Creggan, a few miles from Inniskeen, was, like William Carleton, a local literary hero. In writing a poem about his memories of carting dung Kavanagh is clearly identifying with this Irish-speaking poet who occasionally worked as a farm labourer. One of the best-known folk traditions about Art McCooey is that once, when employed by a farmer to cart dung, he became so absorbed in composing a poem that he drove the same cartful four or five times between the manure heap and the place where he was supposed to deposit his load, until he was eventually caught in the act by his enraged employer and brought back to earth with a few rough words. ‘Owney Martin's splitting yell’, sharp enough to ‘knife the dreamer that the land begets’, doubtless recalls McCooey's irate master. Kavanagh, whose knowledge of the Irish language was rudimentary, nevertheless, felt a warm regard for the Gaelic poets of his native region because as Catholic, small-farm poets they were his ‘rude forefathers’, anticipating to some extent his aesthetic programme of localisation:

… though they were not great poets, they absorbed the little fields and lanes and became authentic through them.¹³

‘Úir Chill an Chreagáin’, the lyric for which Art McCooey is best remembered is an aisling, an Irish poetic mode in which the poet, almost oblivious of his surroundings, describes a visionary encounter with a female personification of Ireland. Kavanagh, despite his tribute to local poetic tradition in ‘Art McCooey’, is writing a primarily autobiographical poem full of evocative realistic detail and his literary ancestor is not any local or even Irish poet but the William Wordsworth of the Prelude, chronicler of the apparently ordinary trivia that contribute to poetic formation. Wordsworth's was an influence which Kavanagh had ingested during his reading of nineteenth-century schoolbook poetry and of which he appears to have been unconscious.

What is distinctive about Kavanagh's early forties' Romanticism is its discovery of a new, unworked ground, its consistent localisation and imaginative insistence on the importance of the poet's intimate relationship with his own home and parish, its ‘awkwardly but alive’ quality which refuses smooth English pentameter speech rhythms, and its occasional creation of a self-ironic yet serious persona with a sharp eye for country humours and a keen ear for Inniskeen dialect.

Almost as soon as he had realised that a whole rural hinterland lay waiting to be imaginatively reclaimed, Kavanagh abandoned the poetics of happy retrospection. One would have expected his series of rustic idylls to continue for years. Instead, by 1941 he was already turning from his brief lyrics with their naif personae and correspondingly simple quatrains to explore, through the medium of more expansive structures, that ambivalence in his own response to the countryside which had made departure from Inniskeen both difficult and desirable. The ugly actualities, metonymically present, though metaphorically flattered, in his celebratory country lyrics are now usually denuded of ‘celestial light’ or fanciful apparel, and adult desires and frustrations, hitherto repressed, disturb and complicate the emotional register of his fictions.

FAIR IS FOUL: TOWARDS THE GREAT HUNGER

In November 1941, the same year in which he published ‘The Long Garden’ and ‘Art McCooey’, Patrick Kavanagh submitted his long poem, The Great Hunger (then named ‘The Old Peasant’), for part publication in Horizon's January 1942 number on Ireland. The nostalgic exile, who had evoked Inniskeen as a lost Eden or a significant poetic source, had been transformed into an embittered, impassioned critic of rural Ireland. It would appear that suddenly and simultaneously the hitherto self-absorbed poet had acquired a social conscience, abandoned affectionate pastoralism for harsh naturalism and shifted from a lyrical to a fictional narrative mode. He had also vastly expanded his poetic range and repertoire. Where previously his favourite forms had been the lyric in rhymed quatrains or the sonnet, and none of his poems had run to more than fifty-four lines, The Great Hunger, a poem divided into fourteen irregular parts, was 758 lines long,¹⁴ and was composed of a collage of poetic styles and forms. Yet The Great Hunger does not represent an unforeseeable volte-face, either in its author's own oeuvre or in early forties' Irish literature. It is a poem thematically and formally anticipated in Kavanagh's writings, though several of the links in its evolutionary chain were not visible at the time. It is, also, as Geoffrey Taylor immediately recognised, the poem Ireland had been waiting for,¹⁵ the progeny of a post-Yeatsian school of socio-literary criticism. It is bred of a new iconoclastic movement in Irish letters, a realist revolution against anachronistic and destructive national fantasies.

The saeva indignatio that powers The Great Hunger was first unleashed in Kavanagh's savage onslaught on his rural past in ‘Stony Grey Soil’ (October 1940). This, and its companion poem, ‘Kednaminsha’, both of which apostrophise his native place and personify it as female, seem designed to convey two conflicting relationships with Inniskeen. Of the two, ‘Kednaminsha’, a flattering and nostalgic sonnet, is by far the weaker, a negligible poem which Kavanagh did not bother to collect or republish. ‘Stony Grey Soil’, on the contrary, is charged with poetic conviction, rhythmically confident, packing imagistic punch after punch, impelled forward with a righteous and relentless emotional momentum, a raw energy that eventually dissipates itself in self-pity and a sad sense of irretrievable loss. Whereas in ‘Spraying the Potatoes’ and ‘Art McCooey’ Inniskeen is portrayed as a fertile poetic terrain and the years devoted to cultivating it, guarding it against blight or manuring it, are regarded as time well spent, in ‘Stony Grey Soil’ Inniskeen appears a psycho-sexual and poetic wasteland, a graveyard of aborted desires, and the years passed there misspent, a squandering of precious youth:

O stony grey soil of Monaghan
The laugh from my love you thieved;
You took the gay child of my passion
And gave me your clod-conceived.
You clogged the feet of my boyhood
And I believed that my stumble
Had the poise and stride of Apollo
And his voice my thick-tongued mumble.
You told me the plough was immortal!
O green-life-conquering plough!
Your mandril strained, your coulter blunted
In the smooth lea-field of my brow.
You sang on steaming dunghills
A song of cowards' brood,
You perfumed my clothes with weasel itch,
You fed me on swinish food.
You flung a ditch on my vision
Of beauty, love and truth.
O stony grey soil of Monaghan
You burgled my bank of youth …

‘Stony Grey Soil’ anticipates The Great Hunger in its bitter exposure of the falsity of the pastoral myth. Its infertile, dreary, yet compelling ‘soil’ will become the dispirited ‘clay’ that dominates all rural life in The Great Hunger. Throughout the poem ‘grey’ is contrasted with ‘gay’. Though ‘Stony Grey Soil’ is a lyric in which the land's victim is the farmer-poet, while The Great Hunger is a fictional narrative in which the hungry fiend's prey is the ordinary Irish farmer, represented by the dramatic character, Patrick Maguire, the two poems occupy the same psycho-sexual terrain. Like The Great Hunger, ‘Stony Grey Soil’ portrays the bond between the farmer and his land as wronghearted, a displaced sexual relationship, and the poet whose place-attachment delayed his removal from Inniskeen is, like Patrick Maguire, a man who made ‘a field his bride’. Here the land is personified as a scheming, ingratiating, possessive woman who has used her female wiles to hold on to her man and trick him out of self-fulfilment. She also takes on the role assigned to Mrs. Maguire in The Great Hunger, that of ‘wife and mother in one’. Homeland in ‘Stony Grey Soil’ is maternal as well as seductive, supposedly mature, wise, reassuring, trustworthy. The farmer-poet is simultaneously a prodigal son fed on swinish husks and a beguiled traveller bewitched into brutish stagnation by the charms of a dunghill Circe. This doubly treacherous female relationship suggests deep duplicity, and the farmer-poet is fiercely angry at his own capacity for being deceived. Sexual imagery suggests a perverted (‘strained’) eroticism; the earth that had its way with the complainant for so long was intrinsically unattractive. Like Patrick Maguire, this farmer-poet is characterised as a passive, involuntary victim. In ‘Stony Grey Soil’ all past action and initiative are attributed to the female land who deprived, deceived, seduced, impeded, thieved. Youth's ‘hours of pleasure’ are passively ‘lost’, not actively neglected.

Though ‘Stony Grey Soil’ and The Great Hunger both centre on the metaphor of sexual frustration and both associate it with farming and misplaced trust in a female power, the earlier lyric is altogether more evasive than the later fiction, despite the apparent directness of its accusatory tirade. Where attachment to the land and psycho-sexual unfulfilment in The Great Hunger are presented objectively and dramatically, ‘Stony Grey Soil’ resorts to the more old-fashioned verbal masks adopted in Kavanagh's thirties' poetry: personifications, abstractions, metaphorical generalisations. The metonymic dimension which was becoming a feature of his contemporary verse is abandoned and the poem proceeds by a series of metaphoric correlatives whose subjective referents are sometimes difficult to determine. The fact that the undeceived hero of ‘Stony Grey Soil’ is both man and poet complicates his grievance. Its metaphoric strategy renders ‘Stony Grey Soil’ fundamentally elusive on the connection between poetic and sexual frustration; it shifts about between decrying sexual sublimation through poetry and through place-attachment, and between bewailing poetic limitation, lost laughter and lost lovers, as if all these were almost interchangeable disabilities. The ‘gay child of my passion’ modulates into the ‘first gay flight of my lyric’; the ‘clod-conceived’ changeling is assonantally connected with the ‘clogged’ poetic feet of the apprentice rhymester. Is the ‘immortal’ plough a reflexive allusion to ‘Ploughman’: the plough, once perceived as an aesthetic instrument, painting the meadow, now a murderous weapon, fatal to young life? The most puzzling of the poem's metaphors is the abrupt introduction of a male monster into an otherwise female terrain in the sixth stanza and the near-oxymoronic reference to him as a monster who should, preferably, be caressed:¹⁶

Lost the long hours of pleasure
All the women that love young men
O can I still stroke the monster's back
Or write with unpoisoned pen
His name in these lonely verses
Or mention the dark fields where
The first gay flight of my lyric
Got caught in a peasant's prayer.

The monster remains a private, inaccessible metaphor, an extreme instance of this poem's psycho-analytic covertness.

In the poem's favour it must be said that its metaphorical strategy enables it to zone in quickly on psychic territory, to communicate swiftly and surely through freshly minted images, (‘You flung a ditch on my vision … You burgled my bank of youth’) and to suggest the interrelatedness of creative and psycho-sexual repression. Incompatibility between imaginative transcendence (‘vision’, ‘gay flight’) and the constraints imposed by country living (‘clogged’, ‘ditch’, ‘caught’) foreshadows a similar tension in The Great Hunger, as does the thwarting of aspiration by peasant piety. While the precise identity of child and changeling may not be explicit in the opening stanza, the exchange of a gay love child for a ‘clod conceived’ also gestures towards the stifling materialism/maternalism of The Great Hunger.

Although it is a relatively young man's poem, ‘Stony Grey Soil’ shares something of The Great Hunger's sense of belatedness. Unlike Maguire, the disillusioned farmer-poet has only temporarily made ‘a field his bride’ and his poem ostensibly focuses on the termination of the relationship, not on its prolongation past the point of no return, yet its form, tone and structure subtly suggest that he has not quite made his escape. ‘Stony Grey Soil’ is a saying of the unforgivable, an ugly, unseemly row, that seems intended to prevent any future reconciliation. However, the farmer-poet is still locked in dialogue with the matrix/mistress he is leaving, still absorbed in his past life when the poem ends. The hold this heartland has over him may be deduced from his persistent emotional engagement, the angry vehemence of the first part of the monologue and the deepening feeling of bereavement in the three concluding stanzas. The ambivalent nature of this valedictory quarrel is very evident in the closing lines:

Mullahinsha, Drummeril, Black Shanco—
Wherever I turn I see
In the stony grey soil of Monaghan
Dead loves that were born for me.

Naming introduces a tone of amorous intimacy. On the point of departure, the farmer-poet is drawn back into the thrall of his old passion. Monaghan earth may be transformed into a cemetery like the potato field of The Great Hunger, but it is fertile as well as funereal. The land is finally, if obliquely, acknowledged as a source, as well as a fatal stranglehold.

‘Stony Grey Soil’ is a love poem disguised as a hate poem (a poet killing the thing he loves), or a hate poem that discovers what it loves in the act of destroying it. Either way it is not as straightforward as it may at first appear. A seemingly spontaneous overflow, its spate is powerfully checked by formal restraints. Emotionally, it is as controlled and balanced as a Petrarchan sonnet, five angry, accusatory stanzas, then a volta, signalled by inversion, followed by a change of tonal register from aggression to lament. However, its metaphors mingle across stanzaic boundaries, setting up internal tensions and correspondences, and the paradoxical concluding line fails to bury the past, indeed, affirms the local, rooted nature of the farmer-poet's ‘loves’. Interestingly, this poem's title is the same as that of Kavanagh's near-contemporary, unpublished novel about a young farmer's failure in love, suggesting further interrelatedness between place-attachment and heterosexual relationship in his early forties' writings.

In The Great Hunger the personal anger and anguish of ‘Stony Grey Soil’, its private rhetoric of invective, denunciation and lament, are redirected into a public, socio-literary indictment of small-farm Ireland. A complex emotional response to Inniskeen is transposed into a powerful, despairing vision of lost human potentialities. The first-person narrator champions the cause of his inarticulate, suffering fellow countrymen and countrywomen, the Maguires of Ireland, trapped in a lonely, loveless, laborious existence, dumbly acquiescing in their slow extinction.

In ‘Peasant’ (1936), Kavanagh had already envisaged himself as ‘the representative of those / Clay-faced sucklers of spade-handles’. In ‘The Hired Boy’ (1936), he had exposed the constricted, brutalised life of the country labourer with embittered realism:

He knew what he wanted to know—
How the best potatoes are grown
And how to put flesh on a York pig's back
And clay on a hilly bone.
And how to be satisfied with the little
The destiny masters give
To the beasts of the tillage country—
To be damned and yet to live.

(Proleptically, the hired boy works for one John Maguire of Donaghmoyne.) In ‘My People’ (1937), in which a country poet dialogues with an urban stranger, metropolitan myths about peasant Ireland are harshly dismissed. The stranger conceives of country people romantically as elemental heroes:

Great in despair,
Simple in prayer,
And their hard hands tear
The soil on the rock
Where the plough cannot go

The poet, in his role of native informant, is quick to disillusion him:

They till their fields and scrape among the stones
Because they cannot be schoolmasters—
They work because judge Want condemns the drones.
Dear stranger, duty is a joke
Among my peasant folk.

The poet's role and stance here anticipate those of the Great Hunger's narrator, while the misguided urban stranger will be that poem's implicit audience. Whereas The Green Fool was still heavily influenced by stage-Irish or Revivalist conventions, poems like ‘The Hired Boy’ and ‘My People’ are the first signs of the Inniskeen poet's involvement in an Irish literary counter-Renaissance, a cultural revolution against the oppressions of primitivist and heroic misrepresentation, which was rapidly gaining momentum throughout the 1930s, spearheaded by Seán O'Faoláin and Frank O'Connor.

The second stanza of ‘To a Child’ (1935) originally read:

Child remember this high dunce
Had laughter in his heart and eyes
A million echoes distant thence
Ere Corkmen taught him to be wise.(17)

The ‘Corkmen’, later erased from the poem, were O'Faoláin and O'Connor, Kavanagh's friends, mentors and promoters during the 1930s and early 1940s, and the wisdom they imparted was that the business of literature is social criticism. O'Faoláin and O'Connor, both of whom were disillusioned veterans of the War of Independence and ex-disciples of the extreme cultural nationalist, Daniel Corkery, had emerged in the 1930s as the spokesmen of a new post-Independence and post-Revival generation of Irish writers. Both conceived of literature as a socially engaged, realist art, holding the mirror up to the unglamorous actualities of contemporary Ireland. Their aesthetic programme was subversive of the prevailing xenophobic, puritanically Catholic and primitivist pietas fostered by the alliance of church and state in the 1930s and 1940s, and deliberately discontinuous with what they perceived as the romantic, heroic myths of the Literary Revival.

For several decades after Independence, Ireland remained self-consciously chauvinistic, obsessed with fashioning or consolidating a separatist ethnic identity. De Valera, whose Fianna Fáil government came to power in 1932, was anxious to establish the twenty-six counties as an economically self-sufficient, politically and culturally independent state, totally liberated from its English colonial past; ‘not merely free but Gaelic as well’. His ideal Irish Ireland was a nation largely rural and agricultural rather than urban and industrialised, piously Catholic rather than materialist, Gaelic-speaking or, at least, bilingual, and fostering a distinctively ethnic culture. The Irish were to be a poor but proud people, heartened by a long history of heroic resistance to colonial domination; a nation of small farmers, diligent, sober, God fearing, content with simple pleasures. De Valera's was a national dream which the Catholic hierarchy, who had, not so long before, excommunicated his party, was happy to endorse.¹⁸ By 1940 ‘de Valera's government had complete control inside the country’ and was insulated against outside liberal criticism of its social or cultural programme by the Second World War.¹⁹ Ireland's neutrality in this war fulfilled de Valera's isolationist ambitions only too well. Withdrawal from Europe reinforced Irish post-Independence tendencies towards morally censorious Catholicism, obscurantism and cultural xenophobia.

The most powerful and most relentless critic of the prevailing nationalist Catholic ethos in the 1930s and 1940s was Seán O'Faoláin, who had returned to Dublin from Harvard in 1929, fired with zeal to stir ‘this sleeping country, those sleeping fields, those sleeping villages’.²⁰ He immediately set about dispelling consolatory Romantic fantasies about the glories of Irish nationhood, using short stories, novels, biographies and essays as vehicles for historical and social analysis. In his short story, ‘A Broken World’, O'Faoláin created a prototype of Patrick Maguire, an indifferent, somnolent, scarcely conscious farmer, who appears to find his way by ‘animal magnetism’. His biography of Daniel O'Connell, King of the Beggars (1938), masterfully disposed of Ireland's proudest and most politically and culturally synthesising myth: that modern Ireland was the continuator of Gaelic Ireland. According to O'Faoláin's persuasive thesis, modern Ireland was the nineteenth-century invention of the pragmatic, anti-Gaelic leader, Daniel O'Connell, who had disciplined a horde of socially and culturally disadvantaged beggars into a potential citizenry.²¹ In An Irish Journey (1941), O'Faoláin toured the country, acquainting his readers with the often unattractive face of contemporary Ireland. His response to neutral Ireland's introverted isolation in the Second World War was to launch The Bell in October 1940: a monthly journal aimed at conducting a documentary and literary exploration of various facets of Irish life and opening ‘Irish windows to the world beyond its shores’. The Bell's vision of Ireland was pluralist, embracing all creeds and classes as manifestations of Irish reality and according no ethnic monopoly to Catholics, neo-Gaels or small farmers. In O'Faoláin's view, Ireland's absorption with its own past was pernicious, an ostrich-like escape from the urgent needs of the present. The structures of Irish society were disintegrating in the wake of Independence and no vital initiatives or institutions might be expected from a ruling class which was content to ‘wail for the past like John Ball’.²² He deplored the Irish inclination to take cultural refuge in the artistic grandeurs of a bygone era and consigned the Literary Revival to the imaginary museum. Essays such as ‘Yeats and the Younger Generation’ (1942) emphasised the generation gap between contemporary Irish writers and the Revivalists. The ‘younger generation’

were faced with problems far more insistent: social, political and even religious problems. They had grown up in a period of revolution, were knitted with common life, and could not evade its appeal …²³

‘Curiously, O'Faoláin's influence is most strongly marked not on any novelist’, Frank O'Connor notes, ‘but on the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh’.²⁴ Kavanagh was invited to contribute to the first number of The Bell, which carried that love-hate pair of poems about his native place, ‘Kednaminsha’ and ‘Stony Grey Soil’, the latter dedicated to O'Faoláin. Subsequent issues during O'Faoláin's editorship included the lyrics, ‘A Christmas Childhood’, ‘Art McCooey’, ‘Bluebells for Love’, and three excerpts from a draft version of Tarry Flynn under the appropriate Bell title, ‘Three Glimpses of Irish Life’. O'Faoláin praised the precise rural imagery of ‘Spraying the Potatoes’,²⁵ which was published in the Irish Times, as was ‘Memory of Brother Michael’,²⁶ a poem undoubtedly influenced by O'Faoláin's views on the deleterious effects of Irish historiography.

More substantial evidence of a developing community of interest between O'Faoláin and Kavanagh may be deduced from the fact that the latter's first novel, Stony Grey Soil, was based on the ‘Inniskeen dance-hall case’ which O'Faoláin considered ‘so typically illuminating’ of contemporary Irish country life as to merit narrating in An Irish Journey:

Some local boys got the idea of erecting a dance-hall. So, unfortunately, did the Parish Priest. The two halls were started. Just then the P.P. had to leave his parish on a spiritual retreat. While he was away the local boys built as no man ever built before, so that when the P.P. returned he found the rival building almost completed. The next Sunday there was a sermon fit to scald the hair off a cannon-ball. The local boys' dance-hall became known thereafter as the Anti-Christ Hall. Undaunted, the local boys went ahead and finished their hall.

Then came the fateful question, ‘Which would get a licence?’ The local boys applied to the courts for their licence and were, of course, opposed by the P.P. The Justice supported the P.P. and refused a licence. In due course the P.P. finished his hall and applied for a licence. It is not too much to say that he got it con brio, fortissimo, and suaviter in modo. Now the local boys may survey their hall and wonder what they are going to do with it, and how they can ever hope to pay for it, while the strains of revelry by night come to their ears from the triumphant jazz-palace beside the church.

For O'Faoláin this story illustrated ‘better than a Blue Book the power of the Church in Ireland’.²⁷

It is hardly pure coincidence that it was in a novel based on this case that Kavanagh first revealed a sociological interest in his native parish. His initial reaction had been to appreciate the humour of the situation. ‘Great fun over Halls surely’, he wrote in a letter of 1 August 1939 to his brother,²⁸ but, most probably under O'Faoláin's guidance, he came to regard it as an affair of sufficient import to serve as the basis of his first novel about life in rural Ireland. Several drafts survive of this novel, which was finally completely rewritten and published as Tarry Flynn in 1948.²⁹ None of the extant drafts appears either as coherent or as devoid of comedy as the version Frank O'Connor had read by 1941, so it may well be that his reading was affected more by the latent or potentially serious message of the novel than by any actual sustained tone of despair. On the other hand, Kavanagh did claim that this novel was anti-clerical: ‘The novel belonged to my anti-clerical period. Anti-clericalism was part of the jag.’ So the version Frank O'Connor saw may well have been different from the extant drafts.

O'Connor read Kavanagh's novel as a story of young people ‘in conflict with the furious piety and Puritanism of Catholic Ireland’ and summarised its plot as follows:

In it he describes the life of a country boy in a north of Ireland village which is dominated by an ignorant, good-natured old parish priest. The story begins with an attempt by a group of boys and girls to establish a village hall in which they can meet and exchange ideas. The hall is a symbol of the life they would really like to lead, but which they never can lead because the old village tyrant opposes the licensing of the ‘Anti-Christ Hall’ as he calls it, and there is no one strong enough to defeat him. And so we see the principal character, in love with a decent girl whom he can never meet under decent conditions, masturbating his soul away until the girl he loves is seduced by the local Don Juan (though, except for this once his Don Juanism has never been anything but a mental exercise), while the hero settles down in comfort with a cow of a girl who has a little fortune, and the Anti-Christ Hall becomes a cattle-shed.³⁰

It is doubtful whether the thesis of Kavanagh's first novel was as consistent or as sociologically symbolic as O'Connor suggests. The poet was still his own hero (albeit fictionalised), and the novel's anti-clericalism was intertwined with a new version of that failed romance which Michael Joseph had caused to be excised from The Green Fool. Extant drafts are rambling and confused and their tone is comic. What O'Connor's interpretation, like O'Faoláin's documentation of the dance-hall case, illustrates, is the sociologically biased reading of rural life customary in Kavanagh's Dublin milieu. O'Connor ranked Kavanagh's unpublished novel with O'Faoláin's Bird Alone (1936), his own The Saint and Mary Kate (1932), Gerald O'Donovan's Father Ralph (1913) and Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), all disenchanted realist fictions in an anti-Revivalist mode. A concern with the ‘facts’ of Irish life was, for O'Connor, an interrupted tradition in Irish literature, inaugurated with George Moore's The Untilled Field (1903), continued by Joyce, and resumed in the 1930s and early 1940s by O'Faoláin, Kavanagh and himself. The three latter were ‘merely the strayed revellers of the Irish Literary Revival, and by the early 1940s this was all over and done with’.³¹

An important figure is absent from this thirties' and early forties' triumvirate. O'Faoláin's and O'Connor's influence on Kavanagh at this time was augmented by that of Peadar O'Donnell, managing editor of The Bell from 1940 until 1946, when he succeeded O'Faoláin as editor. O'Donnell, who was a friend of Kavanagh's during the lifetime of The Bell, came from a very similar background; he was reared on a small farm near Dungloe, Co. Donegal. Like O'Faoláin and O'Connor he had been involved in the War of Independence, had been an activist on the Republican side in the Civil War, and had turned into a fierce opponent of de Valera. O'Donnell was a socialist who had hoped that the Republican side would bring about a workers' and small farmers' Republic. In 1935 he ended his involvement with IRA politics, but he remained a dedicated socialist to the end. The principal socio-economic issue that concerned him, both inside and outside the pages of The Bell, was the poverty of the small farmers in the west of Ireland.³² O'Donnell had described the life of poor country people in his novel, Islanders (1927), and his literary and ideological commitment to the poor and underprivileged must have contributed in no small measure to the awakening of Kavanagh's social conscience. O'Donnell's humane zeal helped to inspire Kavanagh's poetic compassion for the plight of the small-farming class in The Great Hunger, as well as fuelling his detestation of the prosperous middle classes and his sympathy for the urban unemployed in Lough Derg.

O'Connor has elected 1940, the year after Kavanagh's move to Dublin, as ‘the crucial year for any study of modern Irish literature’. By this time ‘the intellectual darkness of the country was almost palpable’.³³ Yeats was dead and so, too, was Romantic Ireland. The ‘emptiness and horror of Irish life’ had begun to dawn on any Irish writer who was not ‘a rogue or an imbecile’. Irish literature had ‘reached the end of a period’, he advised at the beginning of 1942, and Irish writers ‘must be prepared to come into the open … have done with romanticism … and let satire have its way’.³⁴

However dubious the documentary credentials of Kavanagh's maundering first novel, in the distilled fictionality of The Great Hunger, which probably followed on it, he suddenly arrived at a searingly authoritative exposure of life in rural Ireland. It is a masterpiece, apparently written at white heat,³⁵ powered by a fierce, sustained rage at the primitivist fantasies so pervasive in Dublin's political and literary circles. In it Kavanagh is subverting de Valera's small-farm pieties as much as the perpetuation of Revivalist myths. It is significant that the poem should have appeared in 1941 during Fianna Fáil's wartime campaign to promote tillage farming and potato growing. It is also significant that it should have been first entitled, ‘The Old Peasant’, an ironic usage, since ‘peasant’ was, as Kavanagh had implicitly noted in The Green Fool, a purely literary term in Ireland, where the normal real-life word was ‘farmer’. Seán O'Faoláin had already observed of de Valera's primitivist ideology that he and his party could not be forgiven ‘for leaving out of their philosophy everything in life that is magnificent and irrelevant and proud and luxurious and lovely’.³⁶ Kavanagh once remarked that he had never met anyone so out of touch with the realities of Irish life as de Valera, and his poem is an impassioned denunciation of this politician's rural Eden, a vision of a small-farm Ireland, stripped of all love, beauty, dignity and aspiration. Patrick Maguire, The Great Hunger's anti-hero, a timid elderly bachelor, tied to his fields and to his mother's apron strings, sexually frustrated and imaginatively stunted, also represents a drab realist alternative to the more colourful folksy heroes favoured by Revivalists and neo-Revivalists, Synge's ‘Danny’, Yeats's Red Hanrahan and ‘wild, old wicked man’, Colum's ‘Drover’ and ‘Plougher’, Campbell's ‘Horse-Breaker’ and ‘Fighting-Man’ and F. R. Higgins's ‘Dark Breed’ and ‘Gallivanter’. In addition, something of the anti-clericalism that Frank O'Connor detected in Stony Grey Soil appears to have seeped into The Great Hunger, a poem that illustrates the Church's oppressive power over the minds and hearts of the ‘too-faithful’.

‘Disillusion is also a form of revelation’, wrote Seán O'Faoláin, ‘but to see clearly is not to write passionately … It is not enough for an artist to be clinically interested in life: he must take fire from it.’³⁷ In The Great Hunger Kavanagh achieved a new kind of poetry, bred of the disenchanted realism advocated by O'Faoláin and O'Connor and charged with the polemical zeal of the recently converted, yet altogether different from and independent of the fictions of his mentors, a visionary as well as a documentary poem. Frank O'Connor immediately recognised that The Great Hunger was a poetic masterpiece in the anti-Romantic mode and he set about actively promoting it. It was he who suggested to Cyril Connolly that part of the poem should be included in the Irish number of Horizon in January 1942,³⁸ and as a member of the editorial board he was largely responsible for the Cuala Press's publication of the entire poem in April of the same year.³⁹ However, The Great Hunger is not merely a social and literary critique, a realist satire of chauvinist fantasies. It offers what the age demanded of its writers but considered impossible of achievement: ‘a portrait, a judgment, and an ideal’.⁴⁰ Moreover, its ideal, its vision of possibilities, far transcends its cultural occasion and its ‘breathtaking honesty’⁴¹ and adventurous technique mark a watershed in Irish poetry. The Great Hunger is one of the finest long poems of the twentieth century.

Notes

1. Self-Portrait, Dublin 1975, 11.

2. ‘City Commentary’, The Irish Press, 25, 26, 28 December 1942.

3. The Dublin Magazine, October-December 1939.

4. ‘From Monaghan to the Grand Canal’, Studies, spring 1959.

5. The Bell, October 1940.

6. Lough Derg.

7. The Irish Independent, 23 December 1939.

8. The first part was published in The Irish Press, 24 December 1943; the second in The Bell, December 1940.

9. The Listener, 11 December 1941.

10. See chapter 5 for a discussion of ‘Why Sorrow?’.

11. ‘Spraying the Potatoes’, The Irish Times, 27 July 1940; ‘Art McCooey’, The Bell, April 1941.

12. ‘The Hospital’.

13. ‘A Poet's Country’, Ireland of the Welcomes, March 1953.

14. This count is based on the Cuala Press edition, 1942. 24 lines were bowdlerised and other changes introduced in the A Soul for Sale version. Further changes were introduced in Collected Poems, London 1964 and Complete Poems, New York 1972.

15. Review of The Great Hunger in The Bell, September 1942.

16. I did consider that the reference might be to masturbation, but this does not fit the context.

17. Kav/A/2 in the Kavanagh Archive, University College, Dublin.

18. Based on Joseph Lee and Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, The Age of de Valera, Dublin 1982 and FSL Lyons, Ireland since the Famine, Fontana, London 1973.

19. Frank O'Connor, The Backward Look, London 1967, 224–5.

20. Seán O'Faoláin, Vive Moi!, London 1967, 245.

21. Based on Terence Brown's reading in Ireland, A Social and Cultural History, 1922–1985, Fontana, London 1986, 156–7.

22. ‘Silent Ireland’, The Bell, August 1943.

23. Horizon, vol v, no 25, January 1942.

24. The Backward Look, 224.

25. The Bell, December 1940; April 1941; July 1944; June 1945; January 1952.

26. The Irish Times, 27 July 1940; 14 October 1944.

27. An Irish Journey, London 1940, 288. O'Faoláin notes that the builders of the ‘Anti-Christ Hall’ appealed the case and were granted their licence.

28. Peter Kavanagh, Sacred Keeper, Ireland 1979, 66.

29. Kav/B/14, 15, 16, Kavanagh Archive.

30. ‘The Future of Irish Literature’, Horizon, January 1942.

31. The Backward Look, 229.

32. This account of Peadar O'Donnell draws on Grattan Freyer, Peadar O'Donnell, USA, 1973. Freyer's short study does not treat of O'Donnell's connections with Kavanagh. Their friendship probably pre-dated the founding of The Bell, and may account for the leftward bent in Kavanagh's poetry from ‘The Hired Boy’, 1936. Kavanagh often contributed to The Bell under O'Donnell's editorship. O'Donnell is described in ‘Diary’, Envoy, December 1949, as one who has ‘the giving quality’. This is not altogether complimentary, since the implication is that he is not an artist in his own right.

33. The Backward Look, 224.

34. Horizon, January 1942.

35. According to his brother, he wrote it in little more than ten days, Sacred Keeper, 103, or ‘slightly less than three weeks’, Complete Poems, 393.

36. ‘The Irish Year’, The New Statesman, 9 December 1933.

37. ‘Ireland after Yeats’, The Bell, summer 1953.

38. A note in Horizon, January 1942, states that ‘The Old Peasant’, as The Great Hunger was then entitled, ‘is a long poem of 30 pages of which only the beginning is here given’. Parts I, II, III and 26 lines from Part IV were printed. There are several variants between this version and the Cuala Press version and Part IV is substantially different.

39. James Matthews, Voices, A Life of Frank O'Connor, Dublin 1983, 184–6.

40. ‘The Future of Irish Literature’.

41. John Montague, The Irish Times, 2 December 1967.