SOURCE: “Return in Departure: Towards The Great Hunger, in Patrick Kavanagh: A Critical Study, Syracuse University Press, 1991, pp. 87–122.

In the following excerpt, Quinn considers the effects of Kavanagh's voluntary exile from his hometown of Inniskeen on his early poetry and prose.

Foul Is Fair: Lyrics 1939–1942

Inniskeen is a mere sixty miles or so from Dublin; for the twenty-seven-year-old poet [Kavanagh] it was even within walking distance. However, the literary importance of Kavanagh's exile, the imaginative mileage he got out of it, is utterly disproportionate to the facts of geographical distance. His migration from Inniskeen was pivotal in his writings for almost a decade, approached from different angles in different poems and, in addition, providing the fictional climax of his novel, Tarry Flynn. When the older poet looked back over his literary career in his last great creative phase he summarised it as a circuitous progress from Monaghan to...