Patrick Kavanagh

Patrick Kavanagh was an Irish poet, who was born on twenty-first October in 1904, in County Monaghan, which is located in Ireland. He was the fourth of ten children whose parents are James Kavanagh and Bridget Quinn.
From 1909 to 1916, Patrick Kavanagh studied at the local national school, which he left at the age of 13 years old and then he largely taught himself about literature.
Thereafter, he worked for a while with the company of his father as a shoemaker and then he labored on the family farm.

As mentioned above, Patrick Kavanagh was, above all, a poet. He began his career in the last years of the Irish Literary Renaissance, as Irish nationalism grew.
In 1936, his first collection of poems, “Ploughman and Other Poems”, was published as he still worked on the farm.
This is when Kavanagh decided to move to Dublin that he became a full-time writer. Indeed, in Dublin, he wrote fiction, autobiography, numerous, articles and poems, among which his longest poem is "The Great Hunger,” which was published in 1942, and has a major importance. This poem describes the sad and awful life of an Irish peasant-farmer and depicts the part of the human experience whose feeling frustrated is unavoided.

Two years after his first collection was published, Patrick Kavanagh was not very well-known yet and he was described by The Times Literary Supplement as: “a young Irish poet of promise rather than of achievement” whose lyrics were regular but not good enough to be remembered.

From 1942 to 1944, Kavanagh worked as a journalist. He has his own page in an Irish newspaper. He wrote poems and novels including the poem "On Raglan Road,", about a love story in which he had a great relationship with a woman who is younger than him. It was published in The Irish Press in 1946. In 1947, Kavanagh published his first major collection; “A Soul of Sale”.

After the war of Ireland in 1948, he published the novel "Tarry Flynn", a semi-autobiographical novel and a fictional text about his life in the countryside. In the 50s, Kavanagh and his brother published “The Kavanagh’s weekly”, a British newspaper, but it did not work. Kavanagh’s works were described as emotional, creative and he is well known for his poetry. However, his prose is an interesting piece of evidence to a way of life that does not exist anymore.


In 1954, he was involved in a court case. He sued the magazine "The Leader" for publishing a picture of him as an alcoholic. However, he lost the fight and the magazine won. Shortly after that event, the doctors discovered that he had a pneumonia which is a lung cancer and his health began to fail. In 1965, he married Katherine Malony and on 30th November in 1967 in Dublin. Patrick Kavanagh was and still is considered one of the leading poets of the 20th century