In Patrick Kavanagh peasant Ireland has a poet. But "peasant Ireland" needs an explanation.

Perhaps there are some readers of this critique who can recall an early poem of Yeats's—"Song of the Old Mother."… One feels that the old mother is aware that all she does has been done for generations, and that there is something over and above hardship in her doing of them—felt custom and felt community are in what she does. What she says goes to a traditional lilt in the verse and there is little effectiveness in it. But this awareness of custom and community is fading in the Irish countryside and the poets of today have little support in the pieties that meant so much in the days of W. B. Yeats and Douglas Hyde. The older poets took their Patrick (Joseph Gregory) Kavanagh 1905–1967 Courtesy of Martin Brian & O'Keeffe Ltdmatter...