The Books: “The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry” – Patrick Kavanagh

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 2: Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair

Patrick Kavanagh, great and titanically angry Irish poet, was born in 1904, and while the Celtic Renaissance was still going on as he came of age, he thought it was all a bunch of balderdash. That is not a direct quote. He was much more profane about it. He grew up poor and Catholic, and so had a huge scorn for the Anglo-Irish tradition (of which Yeats was the biggest star), which he felt was, despite all the Gaelic frippery, English in sensibility. What did those rich Protestants know about what it meant to be Irish? His first major poem, an epic, really, was called “The Great Hunger”, about the famine in 1847 – and it’s a giant work. He later disavowed it (he was big on that – he didn’t really stand by his own work, he would look back on stuff in later years and say, “Wow, that sucked.”) But it remains a very influential poem, and many Irish poets of today (Seamus Heaney being the main one), consider Kavanagh to be their greatest influence. Kavanagh was brutal in his critiques, which got him into trouble with the Irish censors. He did not mince words. He went after the British, yes, but he went after the Catholic church, and the vested interest it had in keeping the populace submissive and sex-phobic. James Joyce covered this territory as well. Is there any reason for a perfectly fit man to go through his life a virgin, as Patrick Maguire, the lead character in “The Great Hunger” does? What on earth is the good in that? Kavanagh raged against the prudish restrictions of his society, and tackled the famine on all its fronts. The helplessness of the people was terrible, but much of the helplessness was self-chosen. They had been GROOMED by their culture and their priests to be submissive. This is something Kavanagh could not forgive.

With lines like:

He was suspicious in his youth as a rat near strange bread,
When girls laughed; when they screamed he knew that meant
The cry of fillies in season. He could not walk
The easy road to his destiny. He dreamt
The innocence of young brambles to hooked treachery.
O the grip, O the grip of irregular fields! No man escapes.
It could not be that back of the hills love was free
And ditches straight.
No monster hand lifted up children and put down apes
As here.

you can feel the power of “The Great Hunger”, why he ruffled feathers.

Kavanagh is a major major voice in 20th century Irish literature.

Michael Schmidt, in his Lives of the Poets, writes:

The rich measured achievement of his early poems is betrayed by the prolixity and unbridled anger of his later satires. Beginning with rural poems about real peasants (he was a countryman), Kavanagh left this world for Dublin, rejected much of his early verse and prose, and in indignation and self-pity marked his exclusion from a world that at once attracted and repelled him. A heavy drinker, he concedes that his excesses marred his later career. And yet at the end of it, he produced some of his best work.

A man with a typically Irish tragic outlook, Kavanagh also felt (and this is also truly Irish) that “comedy is the abundance of life”. He consigned himself to oblivion, often with middle finger in the air towards the world that rejected him (he felt).

“My purpose in life was to have no purpose,” he said in 1964.

He felt that the poet’s vocation should be to: “name and name and name the obscure places, people, or events” – and that he did. He was furious that Yeats had the place that he did, that Yeats appointed himself the arbiter of that which was Irish poetry. He wanted to carve out another space.

Schmidt writes:

His is an easier poetry to get hold of, more conventional in its forms and in what it expects of readers than [Austin] Clarke’s verse. [my excerpt of Clarke’s stuff here.] It is not surprising that from Kavanagh stems much of the popular Irish poetry of recent decades. But not necessarily from The Great Hunger, which is inimitable, an invention, like a sturdy plough at the edge of an abandoned field.

While much of his stuff is the epitome of rage, political, social, sexual, and otherwise, thought I would anthologize a poem that cuts me to my very core. It shows the depth of feeling that Kavanagh is capable of, how personal his work always is. The poem is killer, just a warning.

In Memory of My Mother

I do not think of you lying in the wet clay
Of a Monaghan graveyard; I see
You walking down a lane among the poplars
On your way to the station, or happily

Going to second Mass on a summer Sunday –
You meet me and you say:
‘Don’t forget to see about the cattle – ‘
Among your earthiest words the angels stray.

And I think of you walking along a headland
Of green oats in June,
So full of repose, so rich with life –
And I see us meeting at the end of a town

On a fair day by accident, after
The bargains are all made and we can walk
Together through the shops and stalls and markets
Free in the oriental streets of thought.

O you are not lying in the wet clay,
For it is a harvest evening now and we
Are piling up the ricks against the moonlight
And you smile up at us – eternally.