SOURCE: “Virgin Queen or Hungry Fiend? The Failure of Imagination in Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger,” in Mosaic, Vol.12, No. 3, 1979, pp. 153–62.

In the following essay, Thornton delves into Kavanagh's attitude toward “peasants” and their work, religion in the lives of Irish farmers, and the feminine imagery evident in the work.

For the most important poem by the poet long described as the best in Ireland since Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh's The Great Hunger has received surprisingly little critical attention, and much of that mere encomium rather than analysis.¹ While I have a more modest view of the poem than the critic who calls it “one of the most striking and memorable long poems of this century,”² or the pseudo-libeler who said it was “probably the best poem written in Ireland since Goldsmith gave us “The Deserted Village,”³ I do have sufficient respect for The Great Hunger to believe...