Patrick Kavanagh (born in Inniskeen, County Monaghan, 1904; died in Dublin, 1967) was an Irish poet and novelist who wrote in English and is regarded as one of the most important poets of modern Ireland. His work portrays rural Irish life with a plainspoken realism that rejected sentimental nostalgia, setting him apart from the poets of the Irish Literary Revival.
The fourth of ten children of a farming family, he left school at thirteen and spent much of his youth working as a shoemaker with his father and on the family land. His first real encouragement as a writer came from George William Russell, who kept him submitting work. He moved to Dublin in 1939, where he found the literary scene pretentious and insincere.
His long poem The Great Hunger (1942), about the harshness of peasant life, and his novel Tarry Flynn (1948) remain his best-known works. After years of journalism and money troubles, a circle of young artists gathered around the magazine Envoy gave him a fresh burst of creative energy. He died in Dublin in 1967, shortly after the first staging of Tarry Flynn.
His legacy is considerable. Seamus Heaney acknowledged his influence and saw in him a way for Irish poetry to speak from the local without lapsing into cliché. Today he is commemorated by a statue on the Grand Canal in Dublin and by a poetry prize that bears his name.
Key works
- Ploughman and Other Poems (1936), his first collection, direct in tone and far from the idealised rural verse of the day.
- The Great Hunger (1942), a long poem on the misery and despair of an Irish peasant.
- Tarry Flynn (1948), a semi-autobiographical novel about rural life in Ireland.
- Lough Derg (1978), a posthumously published poem of religious and personal inspiration.
Curiosities
A changed surname
According to family tradition, his grandfather, a schoolteacher named Keaveney, became Kavanagh after a local priest altered the name.
A lawsuit over a sentence
His novel *The Green Fool* (1938) led to a libel suit from Oliver St. John Gogarty over a remark about Gogarty's wife and mistress, and Gogarty was awarded £100 in damages.
Teachers and influences
Influenced
- Seamus Heaney 1939–2013
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.