Mr. Patrick Kavanagh, who is about the same age as Mr. [Louis] MacNeice and Mr. [W. H.] Auden, is generally thought of by the better judges among his countrymen as the best Irish poet since Yeats. He is unlike Yeats in his origins, a peasant and a man of Roman Catholic formation, unlike him also in being a love poet whose love is directed to outer nature rather than to women, who eschews heroic gestures, and whose love of nature is a little like that of [Gerard Manley] Hopkins, an outpouring of gratitude to the God whom he sees everywhere in nature, not only in nature where it is strikingly beautiful. He is a bachelor, his poems tell us, a poor man, a man who has suffered from illness and who has sometimes wished that his life might be more intense or dramatic, but who is saved from...