Next Sunday marks the 30th anniversary of the death of Patrick Kavanagh, a restless, often bitter spirit whose influence on Irish poetry overshadows his artistic achievement. It was Kavanagh who led Irish poetry away from the towering presence of Yeats and the Revival, instead pointing the way towards a new awareness of the importance of the regional, most particularly of locality. His finest poems such as "Epic", "Innocence", "Canal Bank Walk", "Peace", "Father Mat", "Advent", "Shancoduff", are revelations of the ordinary, just as his most enduring lines are statements - the lyricism of which is often matched by their absolute force of certainty. Logic and disarming practicality often feature: "Once upon a time/I had a myth that was a lie but it served:" (From "Come Dance With Kitty Stobling"). Now, possibly more than ever, his legacy is central because of the increasing urbanisation of Irish literature, and the potential loss of a sense of place. Kavanagh, in common with John McGahern, personifies the idea of the artist as social historian; both more concerned with authentication than celebration. Kavanagh knew the value of the ordinary, of daily life and of memory. Yet while ever alert to "the simple fantastic beauty of ordinary things growing - marshmarigolds, dandelions, thistles and grass. . . " this sometime romantic dreamer whose early work was dominated by naive pastorals, challenged, perhaps even demolished, more than any other Irish poet the Revival's inaccurate evocation of the Irish peasant. In 1964, near the end of his life, and presumably mellowed, he still described the Revival as "a thoroughgoing English-bred lie." The comment is important, not only because it expresses his view, but because he was one of the first Irish writers to stress that our problems are made by ourselves, as well as by England.
"Clay is the word and clay is the flesh" begins his long epic, "The Great Hunger." It is a bleak, uncompromising rebuff to the romantic pastoralism of the Revival. Raw and devoid of hope it is a portrait of a life strangled by duty and obligation, in which a man is tethered to the soil as well as to his mother. "Maguire was faithful to death/ He stayed with his mother till she died/ At the age of ninety-one/She stayed too long,/Wife and mother in one." Denied all emotional and sexual experience in a closed society, "where eunuchs can be men/And life is more lousy than savage" Maguire exists according to the dictates of his mother, poverty, religion and convention. The work rotates on the contrast between the earth's natural cycle of birth, procreation and death and Maguire's emotional and sexual torper. There is pathos but no dignity. Interestingly, Kavanagh came to reject this work. But its enduring power is contained in its relentless realism.
Paddy Maguire could also be a tragic study of the eponymous hero of a later work, the novel Tarry Flynn (1948) - had Tarry failed to escape. Tarry Flynn, with its splendidly subversive dialogue is in fact a lyric, comic variation of "The Great Hunger" - Tarry seeks salvation, Paddy does not. Anxious not to be viewed as a gloomy chronicler of the rural experience, Kavanagh learnt to extend his realism into a more visionary mode. Just as he quickly denounced his memoir, The Green Fool (1938).
For all the anger of his work, he is ultimately a religious poet. While the Catholic Church as represented in "The Great Hunger" acts as a force complicit with the dire circumstances entrapping those caught in the meanness of life on the small holding, its rituals and symbols, even the religious festivals associated with rural Catholicism, are vital sources for his imagination. For him, Catholicism had a major part in developing an Irish consciousness.
His work must also be read against his ever ambivalent attitude towards his religious awareness. Classifying the shrewd Kavanagh as a naive primitive is ill-advised. His contradictions, confusions and tensions are complex; his poetic response is often one of extremes. Both his life and his work are dominated by his love/hate relationship with his native Co Monaghan, which he celebrates as well as dreams of fleeing. There is also his outsider's desire for, fascination and ultimate disgust with Dublin.
Anyone reading Kavanagh would have to acknowledge his influence on Seamus Heaney, which is as potent as that of Hopkins and Robert Frost. It is not enough to consider the narrow, local environment which created Patrick Kavanagh, an artist shaped by his frustrations as much as by his sensibilities. His work should be looked at within the wider Ireland of his time, an Ireland that was both emerging and inverted.
Regarded as the father figure of the Northern Revival, he strove towards a directness and honesty which was intended to cancel much of the artifice and posturing connected with poetry. This should be considered carefully, as, Kavanagh was, after all a poet, if not one obsessed with art. His determinedly anti-literary stance merits some caution, yet it is true that even at its most convoluted, his poetry never reveals the crafted quality of Yeats or Clarke. His belief in simplicity and instinct is at times absent from his work, particularly his ill-advised satiric verse, but for all his swaggering, embittered sense of self, he often presents the artist/poet figure as egoist rather than hero.
Respectful wariness best describes his feeling for Yeats. It is no secret that he never actually regarded Yeats as an Irish poet, being convinced that the older artist didn't understand the real Ireland, and remained drawn to its more mythic manifestations. For Kavanagh, it was Joyce, not Yeats who had grasped the specific Irish consciousness. It is worth noting that Austin Clarke, who shared Kavanagh's emotive alienation from society, had begun his career in the shadow of Yeats. The lushly seductive idioms of the Celtic Twilight were still lingering, when Clarke's Collected Poems were published in 1936. By Night and Morning (1938) and certainly by 1955 with the publication of Ancient Lights Clarke had established his own voice. But Clarke (1896-1974) was a university educated, middle class Dubliner.
First published in 1917, Clarke continued writing until his death. Kavanagh, some eight years younger, came from a different world, and when he began writing, had read no modern English and Irish poetry. His experience, as well as his world, was limited. But his practicality and shrewdness could create some sharp humour, such as Tarry's deciding: "Hating one's next-door neighbour was an essential part of a small farmer's religion. Hate and jealousy made love - even the love of land - an exciting adventure." In "Epic", the narrator announces he has lived in "important times": a local dispute over land dwarfs "the year of the Munich bother" and in a characteristic example of Kavanagh's often inspired use of tight irony: ". . . Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind/He said: I made the Iliad from such/A local row." This poem resounds with his sense of drama and well as the absurd. Its theatrical grandeur being used to sharply ironic effect.
Discovered by George Russell (AE), who published an early Kavanagh poem in one of the final issues of the Irish Statesman, Kavanagh's first volume of poetry, Ploughman and Other Poems, appeared in 1936. His last, Come Dance With Kitty Stobling, was published in 1960, seven years before his death. For a major literary career, it is brief . Nevertheless he liberated the Irish poet from Irish history - whether for better or for worse remains to be seen. It was he who engineered this liberty, replacing history with "the spirit-shocking/Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill." (Advent) As is true of many writers, particularly Irish ones, personalities loom larger than the work. Discussions about Kavanagh tend to focus on his difficult temperament, as do debates about Flann O'Brien, Behan, or Liam O'Flaherty. Irish literary criticism often favours the anecdotal over the textual, particularly as many who knew those mentioned above are still alive.
Perhaps not a great poet, Kavanagh was a shrewd visionary, who wrote some great poems as well as a fine novel. Vision not technique is his achievement. His place in literary history is guaranteed by his liberating contribution. There are at least two Kavanaghs: a different voice and tone emerged after a serious illness in the early 1950s. Recovery, for him, heralded a rebirth. Clarity, a new charity and a joy in the ordinary and the banal manifested themselves. In exploring the local, he paradoxically used the particular to broaden the poetic experience. At its best, Kavanagh's simplicity achieves "the ultimate in sophistication".
