Patrick Kavanagh: A biography

Seamus Heaney has coupled Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67) with W.B. Yeats as the two most influential figures in twentieth century Irish poetry. Kavanagh was born in Co. Monaghan, the son of a cobbler-cum-small farmer. He left school at thirteen but continued to educate himself, reading and writing poetry in his spare time. In 1929 he began contributing verses to the Irish Statesman and was soon publishing in Irish and English journals. His first collection, Ploughman and Other Poems, appeared in 1936 and was followed by an autobiography, The Green Fool, in 1938. In 1939 he moved to Dublin where he spent the rest of his life as a freelance writer. He first emerged as an important literary voice with his long poem, The Great Hunger, in 1942. Other collections appeared in the following decade to growing critical acclaim. Kavanagh's work was his life, but he was also part of social and literary Dublin for almost thirty years in the company of a gifted generation of writers, among them Flann O'Brien and Brendan Behan. His position in the history of Irish poetry is secure. Antoinette Quinn's biography will be the standard life for many years to come.