#Poetry Seamus Heaney on P. Kavanagh

• Author Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)
• Essay:   From Monaghan to the Grand Canal ( Dublin)
• Genre: analytical essay
• Triva: famous poem Bluebells “The Bluebells Have Withered”
• List Challenges 2018
  
• Monthly planning

 

Introduction:

1. I had never heard of Patrick Kavanagh.
2. He is the most important Irish poet between
3. ….the death of W.B. Yeats and
4. ….the rise of Seamus Heaney (review)
   
5. I read when the Irish Times compiled a
6. list of favorite Irish poems in 2000
7. …10  of Kavanagh’s poems were in the top 50.
8. I wanted to know why Kavanagh is so popular.
9. His Wikipedia page…..gave me the basics
10. He struggled in life and literature.
11. An essay about Kavanagh by Seamus Heaney
12. …is a good place to start my investigation!

 

Who was Patrick Kavanagh? (1904–1967)  .

1. He was born in County Monaghan
2. …the son of a small farmer.
3. He left school at 13  to work the land.
4. He continued to educate himself, reading and writing poetry.
5. In 1939 he moved to Dublin and became a freelance writer.

Essay:  From Monaghan to the Grand Canal ( Dublin)

Conclusion:

1. Seamus Heaney portraits Patrick Kavanagh as a man
2. who was not compensated enough for what he created.
3. The first lines of the essay are a direct quote by Kavanagh:
4. “I has never been much considered by the English critics’.
5. Heaney admits the overall impression after reading Kavanagh’s
6. Collected Poems is a man who knows he can do the real thing
7. …but much of the time he is straining and failing.

 

Strong point:   analysis of 3 poems:

1. Heaney analyses the poem Inniskeen Road: July Evening.
2. It is a love poem to a place written towards the end of the affair.
3. Inniskeen is the poet’s birthplace and home for more than 30 years.
4. Theme: Solitude: solitude of the ROAD and solitude of the POET.
5. Heaney also explains one of Kavanagh’s complex poems:
6. Bluebells For Love
7. Kavanagh’s most celebrated poem is The Great Hunger.
8. It was published in 1942 and is elegy
9. a rage against the dying light of a country farmyard.
10. Tone: tragic about small-farm misery
11. but with a tinge of a comically serious conversation.

 

Weak point:

1. I missed a clear structure in this essay.
2. Heaney is a man whose every word should be appreciated
3. but I felt I was skipping from poem
4. …to personal background
5. then to anecdotes about past poets (Brian Merriaman (1747-1805);
6. William Carleton (1794-1869); Austin Clarke (1896-1974).
7. Suddenly  I was in Kavanagh’s autobiography The Green Fool.
8. Perhaps Heaney could have reduced the scope
9. ..of his essay to just a few
10. of Kavanagh’s poems…..and leave it at that.

 

Strong point:

1. I did learn what I was looking for….
2. Why was Kavanagh so popular?
3. Heaney explains that the
4. …Kavanagh expresses a hard buried life that goes
5. beyond the feel of the middle-class novelist or poet.
6. Kavanagh’s  best work rises up
7. to the surface under internal pressure.
8. You could compare it to a artesian well.
9. The pressure from the confining layers inside Kavanagh
10. forces the words and emotions upward into his poems.
11. Wordsworth  believed that
12. …the poem is the record of a great emotion,
13. later recollected in tranquility.

 

Last thoughts:

1. After reading Inniskeen Road: July Evening and especially
2. Bluebells For Love and The Bluebells have Withered
3. …I can say the poems produced
4. discoveries, connections and glimmers of expression
5. …that I just loved.
6. Probably that is what readers like about Kavanagh’s writing.