SOURCE: “‘It is midnight in Dublin and Europe is at war’: Patrick Kavanagh's Poems of ‘The Emergency,’” in Colby Library Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 4, 1995, pp. 233–41.

In the following essay, Wall examines the effects of Kavanagh's tenure in Dublin during World War I on his verse, particularly The Great Hunger and Lough Derg.

In 1939, as war was breaking out in Europe and as De Valera was instituting Southern Ireland's policy of neutrality, the poet Patrick Kavanagh left rural Monaghan to settle in Dublin: he hoped to earn a living for himself from his writings and literary journalism and, by his presence in the capital, become a central figure in Ireland's literary life. He later described the move as a mistake:

The Hitler War [has] started. I [have] no job, no real friends. I live by writing articles for the papers, mainly on the pleasures of country life which, fifty miles...