“A man innocently dabbles in words and rhymes, and finds that it is his life.” — Patrick Kavanagh

Patrick Kavanagh, titanically angry Irish poet, was born on this day in 1904. He came of age during the Celtic Renaissance and he thought it was all a bunch of bullshit. That is not a direct quote. He was much more profane about it. Kavanagh is the man who wrote “On Raglan Road.” I loved too much and by such and such is happiness thrown away.

On Raglan Road
On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.

On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s pledge,
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay –
O I loved too much and by such and such is happiness thrown away.

Kavanagh grew up poor and Catholic, which fed into his scorn for the Anglo-Irish literary tradition (of which Yeats was the biggest star and creator). Despite all its Gaelic frippery, to Kavanagh it was English in sensibility (and, worse than that, Protestant). When he came out with verse, he came out swinging. It was hard to “go up against” Yeats and all the others. They were Gods. (Side note: in the late 1930s, Kavanagh wrote a novel called The Green Fool – and Oliver St. John Gogarty – a name which I always hear in my father’s voice – sued him because of one sentence he found libelous. And I’m pretty sure Gogarty won a settlement. To quote reality television contestants, Kavanagh was “not here to make friends.”)

His first major poem, an epic, really, was called “The Great Hunger”, about a peasant named Patrick Maguire, living in poverty and taking care of his mother and sister. He has no recourse, he has no outer life, it is all duty, family-bound, tradition-bound, no escape. In the poem, Kavanagh skewers all of the myths about Irish rural life, so beloved by the poets of his time. (You can read the whole thing here.) He later disavowed “The Great Hunger” (he did this a lot with his own work). But it was a very influential poem, and many later Irish poets (Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland), consider Kavanagh to be a massive inspiration in their own work.

Kavanagh was brutal in his critiques, and this got him into trouble with Irish censors. He did not mince words. He went after the British, yes, but he went after the Catholic Church, too, and he went after it hard. In his eye, the Church’s sex-phobia ruined people’s lives. James Joyce covered this territory very well. Joyce basically couldn’t live in Ireland BECAUSE of it. Is there any reason for a man being forced to go through his life a virgin, as Patrick Maguire, the lead character in “The Great Hunger”, does? What is the purpose of lifelong virginity, if you haven’t taken vows of celibacy? It serves no purpose except to deny people the possibility of joy. Kavanagh raged against his society’s prudish restrictions. He didn’t just go after the thing, he went after the STORY about the thing, the story told over and over, because it’s the story which has such damaging staying power. The Irish were GROOMED by their culture and their priests to be submissive. Kavanagh could not – would not – forgive it.

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”. Kavanagh had a wild and difficult life. He never made much money, and relied on the support of well-placed friends. Acclaim, when it did come, came late. He worked as a journalist, a bartender, he moved around, from Dublin, to Belfast. He was condescended to by the literati, who saw him as a savage. He attacked the Anglo-Irish contingency’s misty-eyed romanticization of Irish peasant life. He told the truth about poverty, of hunger, of deprivation. In doing so, he attacked all of the tenets of the Irish Renaissance, which – famously – looked “to the West” for its inspiration, i.e. the “untouched” rural people in the west of Ireland. This “narrative” still has enormous psychological power. And listen, I love Yeats. I was raised with Yeats. My first published piece was about my father and Yeats. But Kavanagh’s anger was well-directed. He was a part of that very population so romanticized by the Anglo-Irish writers, and he was here to tell them, “It was not romantic, it was fucking brutal, stop speaking for me, let me speak for myself.”

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

I mean, read this, and WEEP.

Epic

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul’
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel –
‘Here is the march along these iron stones.’
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

A man with a tragic outlook, Kavanagh also felt that “comedy is the abundance of life”. “My purpose in life was to have no purpose,” he said in 1964.

He felt the poet’s vocation should be to: “name and name and name the obscure places, people, or events” and he did this with a fury. He was furious about Yeats’ towering spot in the culture, he was furious at how Yeats had appointed himself the voice of Irish poetry and Irish-ness. Kavanagh carved out another space. His voice is undeniable. Russell Crowe sure thinks so. When he won the BAFTA for his performance in A Beautiful Mind, he quoted Kavanagh’s poetry in his acceptance speech (which was cut from the broadcast):

To be a poet and not know the trade,
To be a lover and repel all women;
Twin ironies by which great saints are made,
The agonising pincer-jaws of heaven.

Much of Kavanagh’s stuff is ignited by rage, but here are a couple of poems showing the depth of feeling Kavanagh was capable of, how personal his work always was. (The achingly tender “Raglan Road” is another example.)

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.

Having Confessed

Having confessed he feels
That he should go down on his knees and pray
For forgiveness for his pride, for having
Dared to view his soul from the outside.
Lie at the heart of the emotion, time
Has its own work to do. We must not anticipate
Or awaken for a moment. God cannot catch us
Unless we stay in the unconscious room
Of our hearts. We must be nothing,
Nothing that God may make us something.
We must not touch the immortal material
We must not daydream to-morrow’s judgment—
God must be allowed to surprise us.
We have sinned, sinned like Lucifer
By this anticipation. Let us lie down again
Deep in anonymous humility and God
May find us worthy material for His hand.

Quotes

Seamus Heaney:

And then came this revelation and confirmation of reading Kavanagh. When I discovered ‘Spraying the Potatoes’ in the old Oxford Book of Irish Verse, I was excited to find details of a life which I knew intimately – but which I had always considered to be below or beyond books – being presented in a book. The barrels of blue potato spray which had stood in my own childhood like holidays of pure colour in an otherwise grey field-life – there they were, standing their ground in print. And there too was the word ‘headland’, which I guessed was to Kavanagh as local a word as ‘headrig’ was to me.

Michael Schmidt:

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.

John Nemo, Kavanagh’s biographer:

He realized that the stimulating environment he had imagined was little different from the petty and ignorant world he had left. He soon saw through the literary masks many Dublin writers wore to affect an air of artistic sophistication. To him such men were dandies, journalists, and civil servants playing at art. His disgust was deepened by the fact that he was treated as the literate peasant he had been rather than as the highly talented poet he believed he was in the process of becoming.

Seamus Heaney:

Kavanagh’s genius had achieved single-handedly what I and my grammar-schooled, arts-degreed generation were badly in need of – a poetry that linked the small farm life which had produced us to the slim-volume world we were now supposed to be fit for. He brought us back to what we came from.

Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Irish poets after Yeats were less attracted to the problems raised by symbolism and modernism than were Americans. Yeats, an Anglo-Irish Protestant, cast a long shadow, and Catholic poets Austin Clarke and Patrick Kavanagh sought to distinguish their own efforts.

Michael Schmidt:

Kavanagh, [Austin] Clarke and Padraic Fallon had to work out from the great poem of Yeats; they had to “write a whole psychic terrain back into it.” Indeed, the overshadowed Irish poet, the poet who isn’t Yeats, or Heaney, has always to clear a space in the shadow of these presences.

Eavan Boland:

I had the good fortune to meet Kavanagh when I was still a student. I sat across from him in a café at the bottom of Grafton Street, where they still turned and gritted the coffee beans in the window. Our conversation was brief but memorable, at least for me. And yet it would be years before I could unpick the legendary threads, the second-hand mythology of the poet. Once I did I could bring with me into later life not an image of sitting across from him, but the less easily realized shape of a writer of persistence and craft: an innovative and dissenting poet, neither afraid of the limits of his subject matter nor the reach of his own imagination.

Seamus Heaney:

Kavanagh gave you permission to dwell without cultural anxiety among the usual landmarks of your life. Over the border, into a Northern Ireland dominated by the noticeably English accents of the local BBC, he broadcast a voice that would not be cowed into accents other than its own. Without being in the slightest way political in its intentions, Kavanagh’s poetry did have political effect. Whether he wanted it or not, his achievement was inevitably co-opted, north and south, into the general current of feeling which flowed from and sustained ideas of national identity, cultural otherness from Britain and the dream of a literature with a manner and a matter resistant to the central Englishness of the dominant tradition. No admirer of the Irish Literary Revival, Kavanagh was read initially and almost entirely in light of the Revival writers’ ambitions for a native literature.

Michael Schmidt:

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. 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.

Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Kavanagh debuked the early twentieth-century Irish literary movement led by Yeats for its elitist “English” mystification of the land and the peasantry. An influence on Seamus Heaney, Kavanagh brought into Irish poetry an idiom closer to Irish English speech, a sensibility more intimate with rural Irish experience.

Anthony Cronin, Dead as Doornails:

The town it is true buzzed with stories of his sayings and his behaviour, but they were stories designed to show him as a maladroit, mannerless oaf, and among the sort of people who retailed them, even the now very cursory acknowledgements of genius were left out. One heard such stories everywhere. They were part of Dublin’s social currency. If the person concerned was literary, he might just gravely incline his head and say, It was a pity Paddy hadn’t stayed down on the farm and stuck to the lyric thing, that he was making a fool out of himself in Dublin and it wasn’t doing him any good. It therefore came as something of a surprise to me, when I met him through Envoy, to find that Patrick Kavanagh was a deeply serious man with an intellect which was humorous and agile, as well as being profound and apparently incorruptible. He was also, in that first relationship at least, apparently warm and generous. On someone who already admired his work, his impact was extraordinary. More than any other man I have met, he fitted Dr Johnson’s description of Edmund Burke: ‘If you sheltered with him in a doorway from a drove of oxen for a minute, you would depart from him knowing you had been in the company of a man of genius.’

Patrick Kavanagh:

When I came to Dublin, the Irish Literary Affair was still booming. It was the notion that Dublin was a literary metropolis and Ireland, as invented and patented by Yeats, Lady Gregory and Synge, a spiritual entity. It was full of writers and poets and I am afraid I thought their work had the Irish quality.

Seamus Heaney:

I had been hungry for this kind of thing without knowing what it was I was hungering after.

Michael Schmidt:

Yeats became his bete noire: there was jealousy that Yeats defined the space within which Irish poetry might be reocgnized.

 
 
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