SOURCE: “A Poet of the Countryside,” in Review of English Literature, Vol. 5, No. 3, July, 1964, pp. 79–86.

In the essay below, Warner describes how Kavanagh's life as an Irish farmer informed his verse.

                                                            Who owns them hungry hills That the water-hen and snipe have forsaken? A poet? Then by heavens he must be poor. 

The poet who owned the hills was Patrick Kavanagh, and he was poor enough. His ‘black hills’ yielded him little in crops or cash, but from the seed sown there he reaped later a harvest of poetry.

Kavanagh's Collected Poems¹ span a wide range of poetic achievement and development. He begins in something of a Georgian pastoral style. His ‘Ploughman’ reveals a lyrical gift and a felicity of phrase:

I turn the lea-green down Gaily now, And paint the meadow brown With my plough. 

I dream with silvery gull And brazen crow. A thing that is...