Kavanagh, Patrick Joseph

(1904-1967)

   Irish poet born near Inniskeen, County Monaghan, son of a shoemaker and farmer. He tried his hand at shoemaking, gave it up and spent the next 20 years working on the family farm, educating himself and writing poetry. He had some poems published in a local newspaper in the early 1930s and moved to Dublin in 1939, where he became a journalist. In spite of the fact that the Dublin literary people poked fun at "That Monaghan Boy," he was appointed to the faculty of English in University College, Dublin, in 1955. His epic poem The Great Hunger (1942) put him in the front rank of modern Irish poets. He lived with lung cancer from 1955 and died in Dublin of bronchitis. Some of his other poetry publications: Ploughman and Other Poems, 1936. A Soul for Sale, 1947. Come Dance with Kitty Stobling, 1960. Collected Poems, 1964. Some of his poems: "A Christmas Childhood," "Canal Bank Walk," "Father Mat," "If Ever You Go to Dublin Town," "Inniskeen Road: July Evening," "Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin," "Potato Spraying."

   Sources: Antholog y of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry. Keith Tuma, ed. Oxford University Press, 2001. Chief Modern Poets of Britain and America. 5th edition. Gerald DeWitt Sanders, and John Herbert Nelson, ed., Macmillan, 1970. Contemporary Irish Poetry: An Antholog y. Anthony Bradley, ed. University of California Press. New and rev. ed., 1988. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. Ireland in Poetry Charles Sullivan, ed. Harry N. Abrams, 1990. Irish Poetry after Yeats: Seven Poets. Maurice Harmon, ed. Little, Brown, 1979. The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). Poemhunter (www.poemhunter.com). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000.