SOURCE: “The Poetry of Patrick Kavanagh,” in English, Vol. 18, No. 102, Autumn, 1969, pp. 98–103.

In the following essay, Warner describes Kavanagh's contributions to Irish pastoral poetry.

In 1942 Kavanagh published a remarkable poem, The Great Hunger. On the strength of this poem alone he is entitled to serious consideration as a significant and original twentieth-century poet. For a long time it was little known and not easy to come by. It is now available in his Collected Poems, in a separate edition published in paperback by MacGibbon & Kee, and is included in the Penguin Book of Longer Contemporary Poems (1966).

There is no pastoral sentimentality about this poem. Indeed it is strongly anti-pastoral and it depicts the restricted and frustrated life of ‘the peasant ploughman who is half a vegetable’. The central figure in the poem is Patrick Maguire, whose ‘great hunger’ for life and love is frustrated by a narrow prudence...