SOURCE: “The Poetry of Patrick Kavanagh: A Reappraisal,” in Mosaic, Vol. 12, No. 3, 1979, pp. 139–52.

In the following essay, Foster discusses how and why Kavanagh played the “literary fool.”

It is little more than ten years since the death of Patrick Kavanagh. That his stature is uncertain is not surprising since, as we know, a poet's reputation frequently dips soon after his death. But in Kavanagh's case, circumstantial evidence for a judgement is more than usually inconclusive. A handful of memorable poems are regularly conscripted into English school and college anthologies, but non was drafted for The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse (1950), edited by Kenneth Allott, or British Poetry Since 1945 (1970), edited by Edward Lucie-Smith. In The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973), Larkin represents Kavanagh only by the first canto of The Great Hunger, but might seem to accord him greater status—the entire work being implied by the part...