SOURCE: “Bound to the Soil: Patrick Kavanagh's The Great Hunger,” in Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo American Letters, Vol. 12, No. 4, 1982, pp. 279–89.

In the following essay, Veldhuis analyzes the themes and techniques Kavanagh employed in The Great Hunger.

Fled are those times when, in harmonious strains, The rustic poet praised his native plains. 

In 1939 Patrick Kavanagh, aged 35, gave up farming in his native village Inniskeen, County Monaghan, to start a literary career in Dublin. He made his move from the country to the capital at a turning-point in Irish literature. In the early decades of the century the Literary Renaissance, headed by Yeats and Synge, had given a strong impetus to the cause of Irish independence, but by the 1930s a civil war and years of political unrest had impaired the vision of Ireland as a proud peasant-nation nurtured by a heroic past and moving towards a glorious future...