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...