Kavanagh's Weekly

The UCD Library Cultural Heritage Collections Blog has published my blog post on Kavanagh's Weekly, a rather scurrilous publication edited by Patrick Kavanagh for thirteen weeks in 1952.

You can read it here.

Patrick Kavanagh isn't one of my favourite poets, although some of his poems ("Advent", "Raglan Road", "To The Man After the Harrow", "Epic") are truly great. But he also wrote a lot of dull, flat stuff and his constant attitudinizing was tiresome. His reputation in Ireland today is partly based on the fact that he wrote some genuinely popular poetry, probably the last Irish poet to do so. But it's also based on the fact that he was reacting against the Gaelic Revival, and also that he exemplifies a sort of vague spirituality that post-Catholic Ireland finds congenial.

Nevertheless I'm fascinated by Patrick Kavanagh as a person. I've read his biography at least twice, but the principal source of my fascination is Anthony Cronin's hilarious Dead as Doornails, a memoir of Dublin literary circles after World War Two. God knows how often I've read that one. I've lost count.

Kavanagh's Weekly is an entertaining subject, but it's also an example of how scattershot condemnation is ultimately pointless. It cancels itself out. Kavanagh's Weekly lashed out at pretty much every aspect of Irish life, every Irish institution. It's hard to take such compulsive oppositionalism seriously. I sometimes worry that Irish conservatives fall into the same tendency.