Patrick Kavanagh

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Patrick Kavanagh bigraphy, stories - Poet

Patrick Kavanagh : biography

21 October 1904 – 30 November 1967

Patrick Kavanagh (21 October 1904 – 30 November 1967) was an Irish poet and novelist. Regarded as one of the foremost poets of the 20th century, his best known works include the novel Tarry Flynn and the poems "On Raglan Road" and "The Great Hunger". He is known for accounts of Irish life through reference to the everyday and commonplace.

Life and work

Early life

Patrick Kavanagh was born in rural Inniskeen, County Monaghan in 1904, the fourth of ten children born to Bridget Quinn. His grandfather was a schoolteacher called "Keaveney",http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/archive/1995/0327/Pg002.html#Ar00201 which a local priest changed to "Kavanagh". The grandfather had to leave the local area following a scandal and never taught in a national school again. Patrick Kavanagh’s father, James, was a shoemaker and farmer. Kavanagh’s brother Peter became a university professor and writer; two of his sisters were teachers; three became nurses; and one became a nun.

Kavanagh was a pupil at Kednaminsha National School from 1909 to 1916, leaving in the sixth year, at the age of 13. from the Patrick Kavanagh Trust He became apprenticed to his father as a shoemaker and worked on his farm. For the first 27 years of his life, he lived and worked as a farmer of a small holding. He was also goalkeeper for the Inniskeen Gaelic football team. He later reflected, "Although the literal idea of the peasant is of a farm labouring person, in fact a peasant is all that mass of mankind which lives below a certain level of consciousness. They live in the dark cave of the unconscious and they scream when they see the light." He commented that though he grew up in a poor district "the real poverty was lack of enlightenment [and] I am afraid this fog of unknowing affected me dreadfully."

Writing career

Kavanagh’s first published work appeared in 1928 in the Dundalk Democrat and the Irish Independent. Kavanagh encountered a copy of Irish Statesman, edited by George William Russell who published under the name A E Russell (AE), a leader of the Irish Literary Revival. Russell at first rejected Kavanagh’s work but encouraged him to keep submitting, and he went on to publish Kavanagh in 1929 and 1930. This inspired the farmer to leave home and attempt to further his aspirations. In 1931, he walked the eighty kilometres to meet Russell in Dublin, where Kavanagh’s brother was a teacher. In Dublin, Russell gave Kavanagh books, among them works by Feodor Dostoyevsky, Victor Hugo, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Robert Browning and became Kavanagh’s literary advisor. Kavanagh joined Dundalk library and the first book he borrowed was The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot.

Kavanagh’s first collection, Ploughman and Other Poems was published in 1936, notable for its realistic portrayal of Irish country life, free of romantic sentiment often seen at the time in rural poetry, a trait he abhorred. Published by Macmillan in its series on new poets, his work made a commitment to colloquial speech and the unvarnished lives of real people, a trajectory which made him unpopular with the literary establishment. Two years after his first collection was published he had yet to make a significant impression. The Times Literary Supplement described him as "a young Irish poet of promise rather than of achievement," and The Spectator commented that "like other poets admired by A.E., he writes much better prose than poetry. Mr. Kavanagh’s lyrics are for the most part slight and conventional, easily enjoyed but almost as easily forgotten." In 1938, he went to London and remained there for about five months. The Green Fool, a loosely autobiographical novel, was published in 1938 and was accused of libel. Oliver St. John Gogarty sued Kavanagh for his description of his first visit to Gogarty’s home: "I mistook Gogarty’s white-robed maid for his wife or his mistress; I expected every poet to have a spare wife." Gogarty, who had taken offence at the close coupling of the words "wife" and "mistress", was awarded £100 in damages. The book, which recounted Kavanagh’s rural childhood and attempts to become a writer, garnered international recognition and good critical reviews.