Patrick Kavanagh

Patrick Kavanagh has for long represented an alternative vision of Irish poetry to the high melodrama and attitudinising of W. B. Yeats. Low key and apparently equable in tone, though often revealing a sly acerbic wit, Kavanagh’s verse has represented a domestic, though not domesticated, alternative to the high-falutin’ rhetoric of the Yeatsian mode, pitching itself to the quotidian world of de Valera’s ‘Catholic Republic’, famously extolling the virtues of the ‘parochial’ in contrast to the siren call of the cosmopolitan and metropolitan, like Joyce finding its inspiration in the streets and alleys of a middle and lower class Dublin and the stony acres, literal and metaphoric, of a sparse rural economy, and, like Flann O’Brien, preferring the bicycle as a mode of poetic transport to the high horse of the ‘last Romantics’. It confirms Seamus Heaney’s claim that Kavanagh ‘gave single-handed permission for Irish poets to trust and cultivate their native ground and experience.’

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: ‘Important Places, Times’ ~ Stan Smith
2. Life and Work: The Poetics of Sincerity ~ Elmer Kennedy-Andrews
3. Kavanagh’s Poetics and Prose: Against Formulae ~ Alex Davis
4. The Moment of Kavanagh’s Weekly ~ Gerry Smyth
5. Kavanagh and the Irish Pastoral Tradition ~ Oona Frawley
6. The Great Hunger and Mother Ireland ~ Edward Larrissey
7. An ‘Unmeasured Womb’: A Soul for Sale and the 1937 Irish Constitution ~ Michael Murphy
8. The Later Poetry and its Critical Reception ~ John Goodby
9. ‘In Blinking Blankness’: The Last Poems ~ John Goodby
10. ‘The Door and What Came Through It’: Aspects of Influence ~ Bruce Stewart

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