Patrick Kavanagh

Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967), Irish poet and novelist, best known for his volume The Great Hunger (1942). Its title poem recounts the frustrations and deprivations of Irish farmers and their families. Kavanagh was born in Inniskeen, County Monaghan. After finishing primary school at the age of 13, he followed his father’s path and worked as a cobbler and farmer. He published his first volume of poetry, Ploughman and Other Poems, in 1936. In 1939 Kavanagh moved to Dublin, where he worked as a journalist and wrote The Great Hunger. In 1952 Kavanagh and his brother, Peter, launched Kavanagh's Weekly, a magazine that ran for only 13 issues but allowed Kavanagh to indulge his furious dislike of Dublin literary circles and Irish politics. He developed lung cancer in 1953, but after treatment entered a particularly productive phase of writing.

Although his poetry is rooted in reality, Kavanagh was not afraid of sentimentality in his work.His descriptions are precise, demonstrating an abiding loyalty to his rural roots, as seen in these lines from the third section of the poem “The Great Hunger,” which describes men plowing their field: “Yet sometimes when the sun comes through a gap/These men know God the Father in a tree:/The Holy Spirit is the rising sap,/And Christ will be the green leaves that will come/At Easter from the sealed and guarded tomb.” Critics cite Kavanagh as one of the most significant Irish poets since William Butler Yeats, and Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney has praised his work highly.

Other works by Kavanagh include the novels The Green Fool (1938), Tarry Flynn (1948), and By Night Unstarred (1978). His Collected Poems was published in 1973.