I opened Patrick Kavanagh's "The Green Fool" with the fear that once more I was going to be treated to the comically condescending view of the Irish peasant, or to the heroic and poetic. It soon appeared that this distinguished young poet has more in common with men like John Clare and Edward Thomas; for this is the Irish peasant writing with the simplicity, even the craftiness, of his kind about his life in the cabin. How he cobbled, how he plowed, how he hired himself at a hiring fair, saw a bride sold at a wedding, and became one of the boys who cut telegraph wires and stopped trains in "the Troubles"—these are his stories, simple reports of everyday life. Under the simplicity, in those lines of everyday talk between people selling pigs, soling shoes, going to chapel, and so on, there is a truthfulness which...