Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Patrick Kavanagh

Critical Essay by Patrick Kavanagh

In 1922 [O'Connor], with O'Faolain, took the Republican side in the Civil War, and his early stories, like O'Faolain's, are based on those experiences. Unlike O'Faolain's, however, O'Connor's lack the somewhat cynical objectivity which the theme demanded. Next we find him interned. The Internment Camp was for him the equivalent of a university. There among his fellow internees were to be found a number of men with questioning minds…. O'Connor made contact with the humanist side of letters and with Yeats. He contributed poems, stories and reviews of Gaelic plays to [The Irish Statesman], and these are all full of the warm imagination of young genius. But they also suffer from a serious defect which can, I think, be attributed to the influence of Yeats. Yeats created a pose of swift indifference to the common earth, and the same isolation in the thin air of "literature" is to be found...
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