Dr Peter Kavanagh, at the moment of his death last week in the US, was the most important surviving figure of 20th century Irish literature. Although his artistic role was really that of handservant to his brother, such is the gargantuan breadth of Patrick Kavanagh's poetic vision that both he and Peter will, in a thousand years, be remembered, revered and read.
Peter had many great qualities as a man, writer and intellect, but perhaps his greatest gifts were his capacities for humility and love. Disabused of his own early poetic ambitions by Patrick, who told him there could only be one poet in any family, he devoted himself from his teens to what he unsentimentally recognised as his brother's superior genius. He learned about poetry so he could guide and protect Patrick, whose "ignorance" both men regarded as essential to the preservation of his gift. In his role as critic/editor of Patrick's work, Peter was rigorous and direct and unquestionably sharpened Patrick's sensibility for the exploration of his own gift. Each new offering was subjected to the ultimate acid test: did it have "the flash"? In one letter, Patrick picked up on a comment of Peter's: "Interesting you say I go false in the Mucker poems. They are lies. I never belonged there. Terrible, ignorant, vulgar place Inniskeen."
They soldiered many years together in the artistic desert that was Dublin in the middle of the last century. Peter supported Patrick, materially, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, through many years of poverty and destitution, and it was Peter who preserved the best of the poems, spending months or years sorting and ironing - yes, ironing - the dog-eared surviving manuscripts before printing them up in fine volumes on a home-made handpress constructed by Peter from bits of scrap metal.
Without Peter, many of Kavanagh's best poems would be lost.
Since Patrick died, four decades ago, Peter has been as though his ghost in the world, reiterating his perspectives and defending his interests and reputation. In this he was fulfilling an obligation to Patrick but also motivated by what he called "my own poetic faith". He had no choice, he would explain, "because I was hooked on poetry at least as solidly as he was".
Peter's own books about Patrick are themselves great works of poetry, history and art. The two most indispensable books to an understanding of Patrick Kavanagh are The Complete Poems of Patrick Kavanagh, and Sacred Keeper (both books are published by Kavanagh Hand Press, though largely unavailable in Ireland due to a long-running legal dispute). The title of the latter work derived from Patrick's designation of his brother as "the sacred keeper of my sacred conscience". A compendium of letters, essays, extracts, reminiscences and reflections, interspersed with sections of biography and a few photographs, Sacred Keeper conveys the essence of Patrick Kavanagh and the primary mission of his work.
"When I write about Patrick Kavanagh," it begins, "I write as a partisan, as his alter ego, almost as his evangelist." Their relationship as brothers, he stresses on the next page, is scarcely relevant: "My interest in him was mainly as a poet."
For both men, poetry was a moral calling that required one to be rigorous beyond other considerations. This ethic was to cost them both dearly throughout their difficult public lives. "The poetic mind," said Peter, "is a strictly moral mind pared of decoration." A poem is really a prayer, he would say; the true poet is gifted by God, and both are far scarcer phenomena than is generally believed.
I became friendly with Peter towards the end of his life and had the great privilege, two summers ago, of interviewing him in public at Trinity College Dublin, before 500 devotees of Patrick Kavanagh's work.
"We were enchanted," he explained, meaning that poetry was not literature, but theology, and those who are given the gift are therefore touched by God in a way others rarely are. Peter believed that what marked his brother apart from mere literary giants such as Yeats, Synge, Joyce and Beckett was that he had found his way back to the Source.
He did not regard literature as a means of chronicling the human condition, but as a chink through which we might peer into the fourth dimension of life, that aspect of existence that remains invisible but is always seeking to find ways of telling us its truth.
"The experience, as I see it," he reiterated that night in TCD, "is really prayer. Patrick believed in the divinity, so what he hoped was to get a flash of that beatific vision, that supernatural place. Words are the least important part of it. In a poem, words burn up in a tremendous thread of something unusual."
In the person of Peter Kavanagh, the same thing happened. He was, as he once rather reluctantly allowed of Yeats, a poet in the very fabric of his life. May eternal light shine upon him.