SOURCE: “Kavanagh's Calculations and Miscalculations,” in Colby Library Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 2, 1976, pp. 65–82.

In the excerpt below, Casey assesses Kavanagh's place as a poet, novelist, and critic.

For all of Yeats's eerie mythologies and Clarke's assonantal soundings and Colum's wandering drovers, the Kavanagh of the Canal Bank resurrection provides the surest voice of continuation, and “Continuation,” he insists, “is everything.”¹ Yeats has lingered on as a vestige of the Victorian myth² and Clarke lies deeply shrouded in the Celtic mist and Colum hovers always on the verge of Parnassian heights. But it is the arrogant and persistent Northern brogue of Patrick Kavanagh, the dung-heeled ploughman, that shouts from the bogland and echoes off Slieve Gullion's airy side:

I turn the lea-green down Gaily now, And paint the meadow brown With my plough.(3) 

Kavanagh, the self-conscious country rhymer, becomes for us the last of Cathbad's noble line, and his experiences...