SOURCE: “Patrick Kavanagh and the Killing of the Irish Revival,” in Colby Library Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 3, 1981, pp. 170–83.

In the essay below, Garratt examines how Kavanagh's poems represent a departure from the ideals and techniques of the Irish Revival in poetry, whose chief exemplar was W. B. Yeats.

When W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, George Russell (A E) and George Moore shaped the literary movement now known as the Irish Renaissance or the Irish Revival, they were responding both to a cultural and artistic void in Irish literature and to their own needs as aspiring writers. Much of the early momentum of the Revival was generated by the rediscovery of Celtic materials which not only provided a context and a tradition connecting modern Irish writing with its ancient literary past, but also offered, as the young Yeats said often in his letters to Katherine Tynan, the opportunity for the...