Patrick Kavanagh
Patrick Kavanagh is unique among modern Irish writers in that he spent the first half of his life as a largely self-educated small farmer in Monaghan, while struggling to find a voice for that experience as a writer. In his early poetry and his autobiography, The Green Fool, he sought to render the realities of farming and to escape romantic literariness; ‘Inniskeen Road’ and ‘Shancoduff’ are key breakthrough poems in this effort. While he was later to reject the didacticism of The Great Hunger, the achievement of this extraordinary long poem is the combination of inside and outside perspectives on the stunted life of the bachelor farmer Patrick Maguire. Moving away from Monaghan to Dublin allowed Kavanagh to re-create his farming world in the comic novel Tarry Flynn and later lyrics such as ‘Threshing Morning’, ‘A Christmas Childhood’ and ‘Art McCooey’.