SOURCE: “Patrick Kavanagh,” in The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II, Oxford University Press, 1967, pp. 275–83.

In the excerpt below, Rosenthal highlights those of Kavanagh's poems that deal with the subject of disillusionment.

The lively-spirited Patrick Kavanagh has in his serious poetry become at once simpler and more ‘private’ than he once was. Without giving us much detail, he communicates a self-weariness and desire for liberation from his own past that seems not unrelated to the closely packed self-searching of Devlin and others. At times the communication comes disguised as boasting that, just when he had thought all was lost, he has come through after all—has learned joy, been loved by women despite his poverty and bohemian character. The poetry then takes on a confidential rather than a confessional tone. He has, at the same time, fallen more and more into the habit of...