Patrick Kavanagh (poet)

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Patrick Kavanagh (1963)

Patrick Kavanagh (born October 21, 1904 in Mucker Townland , Inniskeen , County Monaghan , † November 30, 1967 in Dublin ) was one of the most famous Irish poets and writers of the 20th century.

Life

Kavanagh as a plastic in Dublin

Patrick Joseph Kavanagh was born to the farmer James Kavanagh and his wife Bridget Quinn. From 1909 to 1916 he attended Kednaminsha National School and then worked on the family farm.

His first poems were printed in 1928 by the Dundalk Democrat and the Weekly Independent , and others in 1929 and 1930 by George Russell in The Irish Statesman . In 1930 he made a pilgrimage to Dublin to meet Russell personally, who introduced him to Frank O'Connor . Plowman and other poems were reprinted by Macmillan in 1936 shortly after he moved to London in search of new literary inspiration and to write new poems . The attempt ultimately failed, however, as he could not earn enough money for a living in London, so Kavanagh returned to Ireland. His autobiography The Green Fool appeared in 1938 but was withdrawn by Oliver St. John Gogarty . His song On Raglan Road , written in 1946, was best known for its interpretation by Luke Kelly .

One of his longest poems, The Great Hunger , was published in 1942 and attracted the attention of censors and the police and was banned. It wasn't until 1971 that it was made public along with another unpublished poem.

Shortly before his death, he married Katherine Barry Moloney in April 1967.

Literary work

Patrick Kavanagh is considered to be one of the most interesting and at the same time most contradicting proponents of Irish literature after the Irish Renaissance .

In a manner characteristic of many Irish writers, his work merges a passionate love for his homeland on the one hand and an equally passionate criticism of his country on the other. The judgments about his literary work are accordingly very different; the scale ranges from the esteem of Kavanagh as a “pioneer of modern Irish literature” to a complete devaluation as a “provincial adversary to innovative literary development”.

As an author, Kavanagh made it easy for neither his supporters nor his opponents. Unlike many other contemporary Irish writers, he did not follow their path to leave his homeland full of resignation, but instead chose his very own position as a combative outsider in a specific form of internal emigration. This attitude as an outsider, which he maintained until the end of his life, formed the starting point for both his literary and journalistic work.

Growing up in the tight confines of a rural community, he initially followed his father's path and followed in his father's footsteps. At the age of 12 he left school without any encouragement to turn to literature. Nevertheless, he undertook his first poetic attempts at this early age and was concerned with literary education throughout his life. The educational deficit he perceived as such was sometimes expressed in an aggressiveness, which was also evident in his repeated appearance to an urbane urban audience as a rude rural dweller.

Meanwhile, Patrick Kavanagh's seemingly trivial village origins and rural surroundings formed the basis for many of his insightful, deeper reflections. In this context, the influence of mythological Celtic natural poetry on his work cannot be overlooked, which was conveyed to him as orally transmitted literature in narratives.

In his autobiographical novel The Green Fool from 1938, this special form of description of nature emerges clearly, although this work is still permeated by the conciliatory tone of a balancing humor. In 1948, in the subsequent novel Tarry Flynn , Kavanagh tried to fathom his own ambivalent or contradicting nature much more consistently and seriously . In this novel, he also emphasizes the importance of the small, beautiful things for his life: "O the rich beauty of the weeds of the ditches" (German for example: "Oh the rich beauty of the overgrown grasses of the ditches"). In contrast, his self-doubts in Self Portrait (1964) take on such proportions that he sees himself as a failure in his self-portrayal.

The literary work of Kavanagh can be divided into clearly differentiated sections. Under the influence of Bret Harte and Gertrude Stein , the years between 1928 and 1939 can be seen as a phase of stormy development in which some of his most impressive poems were written, which were published in the Plowman and other Poems collection in 1936 . His poetry from this period is characterized above all by a lively, vital language that strives for magical effects and tries to preserve the child's original imagery.

At the same time, the often hyperbolic mode of expression is supplemented by numerous completely new word creations and mystical charges. Behind the poems from this phase of his work there is above all a sensuality that is directed against the prevailing hostility to the body and the contempt for everything physical by Catholicism in Ireland.

His verse epic in free rhythms, The Great Hunger , which appeared in 1942, clearly urges the fulfillment of sensual fantasies and imaginations with the supporting references it contains to conception and birth.

Kavanagh's move to Dublin in 1939 by no means meant a detachment from his origins from his rural surroundings, Inniskeen. The subsequent phase of hectic journalistic activities began with fonts of very different quality. Under Eamon de Valera he struggled with narrow-minded censorship and got involved in several lawsuits that eventually ruined his health.

As in 1955 threatened to end his work with the cancer, he felt the survival of a very risky lung surgery as a form of reincarnation ( " rebirth ") and developed new vitality and energy, which resulted in a linguistically and intellectually most perfect lyric. He wrote many of the poems he wrote during this period in the classical sonnet form , for example in the poetry collections Recent Poems (1958) or Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and Other Poems (1960) and Collected Poems (1964).

With the virtuosity of his language, Kavanagh gave the otherwise mute rural population of Ireland a powerful voice. In addition, with his unorthodox attitude, he gave her a new feeling of freedom from the previously dominant canonical claims or constraints of Irish Catholicism.

Kavanagh Fellowship

Patrick Kavanagh's widow left the rights and royalties for his work to trustees who use the proceeds to support Irish middle-aged poets in need. In 2014, Gearoid Mac Lochlainn , Joseph Woods and Enda Wyley received the Kavanagh Fellowship.

Works

Poetry

  • 1936 - Plowman and Other Poems
  • 1942 - The Great Hunger
  • 1947 - A Soul For Sale
  • 1958 - Recent Poems
  • 1960 - Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and Other Poems
  • 1964 - Collected Poems ( ISBN 0856161004 )
  • 1972 - The Complete Poems of Patrick Kavanagh , ed. by Peter Kavanagh
  • 1978 - Lough Derg
  • 1996 - Selected Poems , ed. by Antoinette Quinn ( ISBN 0140184856 )
  • 2004 - Collected Poems , ed. by Antoinette Quinn ( ISBN 0-713-99599-8 )

prose

  • 1938 - The Green Fool
  • 1948 - Tarry Flynn ( ISBN 0141183616 )
  • 1964 - Self Portrait (recorded shot)
  • 1967 - Collected Prose
  • 1971 - November Haggard (collection of prose and poetry, edited by Peter Kavanagh)
  • 1978 - By Night Unstarred (Conflicted and completed edition by Peter Kavanagh)
  • 2002 - A Poet's Country: Selected Prose , ed. by Antoinette Quinn ( ISBN 1843510103 )

Dramatizations and adaptations

  • 1966 - Tarry Flynn , adapted by PJ O'Connor
  • 1986 - The Great Hunger , adapted by Tom Mac Intyre
  • 1992 - Out of That Childhood Country by John McArdle with co-authoring of his brother Tommy and Eugene MacCabe (representation of the youth of Kavanagh based on his literary publications)
  • 1997 - Tarry Flynn , adapted from Conall Morrison (dance game)
  • 2004 - The Green Fool , adapted from the Upstate Theater Project

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See the description by Walter T. Rix: Kavanagh, Patrick Joseph . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 pp. (Special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 313 .
  2. ↑ See the description by Walter T. Rix: Kavanagh, Patrick Joseph . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 pp. (Special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 313 .
  3. ↑ See the description by Walter T. Rix: Kavanagh, Patrick Joseph . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 pp. (Special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 313 .
  4. ↑ See the description by Walter T. Rix: Kavanagh, Patrick Joseph . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 pp. (Special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 313 On the sonnet form of Kavanagh's late poems, see the note by Hans Ulrich Seeber, Hubert Zapf and Annegret Maack: Die Lyrik nach 1945 . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Ed. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 365-380, here p. 379.
  5. ↑ See the description by Walter T. Rix: Kavanagh, Patrick Joseph . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 pp. (Special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 313 For the entire description in this section, see also the remarks on Kavanagh's work and biography on Poetry Foundation under Patrick Kavanagh 1904–1967 , accessed on January 19, 2018.
  6. ↑ Kavanagh fellowships worth € 20,000 awarded to three Irish poets. The Irish Times, May 30, 2014, accessed September 18, 2014 .
personal data
SURNAME Kavanagh, Patrick
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Irish poet and writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 21, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Inniskeen , County Monaghan
DATE OF DEATH November 30, 1967
Place of death Dublin