PoetryAlthough never obscure, Patrick Kavanagh has been famous for the wrong reasons, especially in Ireland where a cult of the personality sometimes stood in the way of the work.
Two previous attempts at a Collected Poems failed to dissipate the surrounding din. Only with Antoinette Quinn's recent Selected Poems did Kavanagh stand forth, through his best work, as a purely artistic entity. That Selected, impossible to better in its way, is now succeeded by a third, and probably definitive Collected, also edited by Quinn. Its significance, 100 years after the birth of the poet, is as much symbolic as substantive - a nihil obstat from the official canon, a final bringing in out of the cold.
For most have died the day before/The opening of that holy door.
For a man associated with clayey roots, a sense of place, the extent of Kavanagh's feelings of being lost and of not belonging bears restatement. He abhorred the Celtic Twilighters who gave him his start. But the liberal humanists across the water (the value system in which most poets still write today) weren't his dish either. Nor was the New Critical verse bred out of American universities - though the Beats, then outsiders like himself, had appeal ("their badness is authentic"). As to the all-pervasive Yeats, admiration and resentment alternated before coming to a head in 1965 with Kavanagh's contribution ("Yeats was never an Irish poet") to a disastrous conference on the older poet at Northwestern University in Chicago. His reaction to that constitutes the final poem in the Collected.
Yes, Yeats, it was damn easy
for you, protected/ By the middle class and the Big Houses,/ To talk about the sixty-year-old public protected/ Man sheltered by the dim
Victorian Muses.
This is neither good nor just, but as lifestyle criticism it highlights an antagonism common between poets, in this case Kavanagh and Yeats, as to how the poetic life ought to be lived - the either/ors, so to speak, versus the both/ands. Kavanagh, emphatically an either/or, found the element of artifice in Yeats hard to take, the more so as his own poetics evolved towards naturalness, casualness and the kind of pure spontaneity that had him improvising verses before a none-too-critical audience in the Albert Hall shortly before his death in 1967.
In the name of The Father,/ The Son and the Mother,/ We explode/ Ridiculously, uncode/ A habit and find therein/ A successful human being.
By then the real work had been done, far from the public eye, as such work usually is. Kavanagh's publishing history is so unrepresentative of his actual development that his editor has wisely put it to one side altogether and recast the trajectory in terms of five separate phases, of which the first (1929-38) will be seen, inevitably, as 'prentice work, and the last (1960-67) as decline. It would be unwise, however, to ignore either, as the early phase produced the incomparable "Shancoduff" and the last phase the crucial "Personal Problem", a capstone on his achievement as anguished in its way as Yeats' "Circus Animals Desertion".
. . . What am I to do/ With the void growing more awful every hour?/ I lacked a classic discipline. I grew/ Uncultivated and now the soil turns sour . . .
But the core of the work - not large in bulk but morally immeasurable - is in the three central sections. With distance, one can see how 1950 marks a dividing point in the lifework. The early battles, against Celtic Twilightery and the idea of Ireland as a spiritual entity, had been fought and won, in The Great Hunger, Tarry Flynn and a slew of explosive articles, albeit at terrible cost to the poet. Already, however, the younger writers around Envoy were gathering, an advance guard of what was to swell, by the mid-1960s, to the adulatory throng around the ageing Zen master in McDaid's. One of these, Anthony Cronin, has argued persuasively that Kavanagh's real renascence, aided by editorial payment of a crisp Irish fiver per poem for Envoy, began back in 1950 rather than in the much-mythologised convalescence by the Grand Canal in the summer of 1955. Myth being myth however, in this instance perpetrated by the poet himself, the official version is likely to prevail.
Leafy-with-love banks and the greenwaters of the canal/ Pouring redemption for me, that I do/ The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,/ Grow with nature as before I grew . . .
The soul-transformation at work in those short, inexhaustible poems of the late 1950s ("mostly written", as Kavanagh said, "in about a week") continues to fascinate. Elements can be isolated - his reading of the Beats, and of later Yeats - but they do not explain the essential wildness, freedom and peace that came through, in one last cathartic surge.
O tedious man with whom no gods commingle!/ Beauty, who has described beauty?/ Once upon a time/ I had a myth that was a lie but it served./ Trees walking across the crests of hills and my rhyme/ Cavorting on mile-high stilts and the unnerved/ Crowds looking up with terror in their rational faces.
When Montale writes, without irony, of the divine origin of Dante's Commedia, or Pasternak mentions the "unheard-of simplicity" in his late Zhivago poems, we are in the presence of the same x-factor that endlessly brings us back to late Kavanagh, and calls into question our own ethos of manufactured poetry - the slim volume every three years, the incremental reputation scale, the net of allusions for the salaried exegete to unravel - that he regarded with a mixture of anger, amusement and pity.
So I sit tight to manufacture/ A word-by-word-machine-to-live-in-structure -/ That may in any garden be assembled -/ Where critics looking through the glass can lecture/ On poets X, Y and Z therein entempled.
At the heart of Kavanagh's work, it seems to me, is a birth trauma as powerful in its way as that dramatised in the work of Samuel Beckett. Not by accident is the entire oeuvre sprinkled with terms of foetal innocence and the pain of being born into experience. Essentially, it is a move from inside the mystery of life to the position of an eternal, if compassionate, onlooker. "No-one ever stayed so long in the womb," he said, referring to the obscurity of his early years in Monaghan. If this is true, it must also be said that no-one, by the end of his life, had been so completely and tragically delivered into a public existence - the arena of "spontaneity" on Baggot Street, the sea of faces in the Albert Hall.
So many years later, with the Collected Poems finally to hand and the air heavy with vindication and symbolic import, one should resist the temptation to do the centenary thing and tidy him up for posterity - a little higher than X, a little lower than Y, in the accepted canon. Instead let us leave him as he always has been - separate, a special gift to the living,
. . . the little gods, the ignored/ Who are so seldom asked to write the letter/ Containing the word.
Harry Clifton is teaching this year at the School of English, University College Dublin
Collected Poems, Patrick Kavanagh. Edited by Antoinette Quinn Allen Lane/Penguin, 299pp. £25