Patrick Kavanagh Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Anthony Cronin

Critical Essay by Anthony Cronin

SOURCE: “Innocence and Experience: The Poetry of Patrick Kavanagh,” in Nimbus, Vol. 3, No. 4, Winter, 1956, pp. 20–23.

In the following essay, Cronin discusses Kavanagh's satirical poems as an outgrowth of the poet's experiences.

In the world of Patrick Kavanagh's early poems things are seen with the intensity of vision which is a characteristic of many children … but with an emotional intensity which comes from the fact that the poet is an adult looking back through the complexity of adult experience to what it is possible to see again only by shedding the confusions we call experience:

… the newness that was in every stale thing When we looked at it as children: the spirit-           shocking Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill Or the prophetic astonishment in the tedious           talking Of an old fool … … the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables           where Time begins.

These poems...
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