irishpoetry.ie

a curated directory of Irish poetry · by Simon James Brady

Patrick Kavanagh

1904–1967·Wrote in English

Mid-century · Modernists, mid-century and the long shadow of Yeats (1930s–1960s) · Co. Monaghan · English

Monaghan farmer turned Dublin poet. The Great Hunger (1942) demolished the pastoral idyll of rural Ireland; the late canal-bank sonnets found a hard-won lyric grace. His insistence on the local and "parochial" over the "provincial" liberated Heaney's generation. The Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award and the Patrick Kavanagh Centre, Inniskeen, commemorate him.

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