Poet of the stony, grey soil

PATRICK Kavanagh was a self-educated man who became one of our great poets of the last century. His father was a small farmer and cobbler and Kavanagh left national school at 13 years of age. He was apprenticed to a shoemaker but he abandoned the trade after one year when he himself claimed that he had not even succeeded in making one wearable pair of shoes. As one person wrote, he was more destined to toil in the stony grey soil of Monaghan than to write about it. He spent the next 20 years working on the family farm.
In his spare time he wrote some poetry. He had left school with an interest in literature and wrote about the scenery, land and everyday life of his native Iniskeen. His early poetry was published in his local newspaper in the 1930s. The London publishers Macmillans published his first book of poetry Ploughman and Other Poems in 1936 and they encouraged him to write about rural life. Thus the autobiographical The Green Fool came about in 1938. Encouraged by this initial success and by his brother, Peter, who was a teacher in Dublin, Kavanagh moved to London. He only stayed there a few months before returning to Dublin. 
To support himself, he worked as a journalist for numerous publications, including being film critic for The Catholic Standard. He was later to be film critic for the RTÉ Guide. Many of his columns had little to do with films but rather dealt with whatever topic took his fancy. His tendency to call a spade a spade did not earn him many friends.
In these early years, his epic poem The Great Hunger was published in 1942 and his novel Tarry Flynn in 1948. The claim that they were a true accurate account of rural life is probably borne out by the fact that they were both immediately banned.
With financial support from his brother they set up Kavanagh’s Weekly, much of which he wrote and edited himself. Unfortunately, it only lasted for 12 issues. At that time The Leader described him as an alcoholic sponger and he sued for libel. The paper called on John A Costello for their defence but Kavanagh insisted on prosecuting the case himself. He was no match for Costello and lost his case.
Shortly after the court case, he was diagnosed with cancer. While recuperating, he seemed to rediscover his poetic side and his writing career had a revival. His court opponent, Costello later appointed him to a post in UCD. He lectured in the USA and represented Ireland abroad.
The Irish Times compiled a list of favourite Irish poems for the millennium and 10 Kavanagh poems were in the top 50. One of his poems, Raglan Road, which he wrote to the air of Fáinne Geal an Lae has been recorded by many including Luke Kelly, Dire Straits, Sinéad O’Connor and Van Morrison.
In 1967, the Abbey Theatre had a major success with their production of P.J. O’Connor’s adaptation of Tarry Flynn. They brought the production to Dundalk Town Hall which was meant to be a great Kavanagh return to his own area.
Unfortunately, Patrick Kavanagh took ill at the opening performance and he died later that week in a Dublin nursing home on November 30, 1967, 43 years ago this week.
Michael Torpey