Patrick (Joseph) Kavanagh | Biography

Patrick Kavanagh is regarded by some as one of the most influential Irish poets after Yeats. Other critics, however, consider him a provincial poet whose main achievement was to give an authentic voice to the peasant culture of rural Ireland after the so-called Irish literary renaissance had exhausted itself in clichés. From the start, Kavanagh opposed what he called the "stage-Irish lie," which seemed to him to perpetuate vulgar, ignorant, and dishonest art. His early poems faithfully represent the native landscape and people, with a jealous ear for local speech and a tremulous passion for the poetic vocation. Critics generally fault his willingness to make statements and praise what Michael Allen has called his "`parochial' vividness," in which the "ethereal literary voice incarnates itself in the imagery of the actual world," as Seamus Heaney has written. Kavanagh has in fact achieved an intelligent, robust, and ultimately mystical body of work...
(read more)