A Poet's Country: Selected Prose

Abstract

Patrick Kavanagh was above all a poet, but for most of his writing life he was also a prolific producer of critical and autobiographical prose. Work for newspapers and magazines was often his main source of income, and it provided him with a necessary outlet for his views on the writers of his time, and past times, on the spiritual function of poetry, and on his own background and experiences as an isolated genius, impoverished, sometimes ostracized and surrounded, as he saw it, by mediocrity. The prose writings thus stand alongside the poems as a vital guide to the thought of Kavanagh and tell us things about him that the poems do not tell. This volume contains shorter prose works from throughout Kavanagh's career: the autobiographical pieces and rural reminiscences and a selection of Kavanagh's penetrating, sometimes scabrous, literary and cultural criticism.

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