Though it is generally agreed that the newly published Ungrateful Singer and O Verse are not among the best poems that Patrick Kavanagh wrote, they will no doubt have delighted fans of the moody Monaghan man. However, the implications of poems being published long after a poet's death are worrying.
The scholar Dr Antoinette Quinn pointed out in this newspaper the other day that when Kavanagh died in 1967, he left more than 170 unpublished 1930s poems; and since he published only about 160 poems altogether in his lifetime, his discarded 1930s verse is greater than his entire published work.
The fear must be that the numerous foot-soldiers in the current standing army of Irish poets (which, as Kavanagh himself pointed out, rarely falls below 10,000) will be greatly encouraged by this news. Since all but a tiny number of our poets never succeed in being published at all, they are bound to take comfort in the notion that some of their unpublished work, i.e., 100 per cent of their oeuvre, self-evidently greater in volume than their published material (0 per cent), might one day be retrieved by scholars working in arcane areas on doctoral theses and dissertations, and eventually published in the latter-day equivalent of Galway's west47 journal and the Times Literary Supplement.
For most normal people, the thought of becoming famous nearly 40 years after one has passed away has little or no appeal. For poets however, the notion of a life lived in the shadows, unrecognised and unrewarded, to be followed by belated posthumous fame, is the ultimate dream.
As for the newly published Kavanagh poems themselves, Ungrateful Singer, with its self-flagellation and its undertones of old-fashioned Catholic guilt, is bad enough, but in its derogatory references to ordinary domestic life, and its pompous implication that poetry is some kind of "higher calling", O Verse does nothing at all to advance the cause of literature.
It is depressing to discover from O Verse that Patrick Kavanagh, who yearned quite desperately for the so-called good things in life, such as "a car in the garage, a piano playing/The Third Programme going full blast" was clearly so unappreciative when he finally got them (as if he was the first to discover the dust of answered prayers). But lo! with the "magic wand of Verse" (how trite, and how embarrassing that capital V) he can now "choose the better things" (meaning poetry, God help us) " - keep the wife and lose the curse/that domesticity brings" - and so on.
The notion that "domesticity" is at odds with the poetic life or spirit has done untold harm over the years to the development of genuine literature in this country. Despite it being perfectly obvious that poets and such-like deviants have always produced their best work when in deeply supportive if boring relationships, i.e., marriage, we are still encouraged to believe that the poet (the genuine article) is a free spirit who cannot be tied down to daily routines, safe jobs and the minutiae of domestic life. When the poor fellow is asked to hang out the washing, or vacuum-clean the carpets, his poetic soul rebels, he leaves the wife and kids, turns to drink, and out of this (in time) comes a Great Poem. Or so the theory goes.
The trouble is that the public at large swallows this hogwash. Themselves bogged down in domesticity and the dreary business of making a living, ordinary people take a vicarious pleasure in the poet's "revolt" (really no more than laziness and self-indulgence), possibly imagining that they too might one day throw off the yoke and light out for the territory. Worse, hating to be reminded of their own circumstances, they take an instant dislike to any poet who dares celebrate ordinary domestic life in his verse.
This latter truth was never more apparent than in the case of the late-19th-century Mayo poet Micheal Mac Giolla Ruaidh. For years, Micheal enjoyed a great reputation in his native county, writing as he did on vaguely spiritual matters, the curse of existence, the general hopelessness of life, the inevitability of death, and digging: all of this being the kind of stuff that well-fed Mayo people loved to hear about in those days (and not much has changed). The fact that Micheal was drunk most of the time naturally meant he was held in even greater esteem.
Few people knew, however, that Micheal was happily married to an older woman (Maire Nic Eannagain, from Lacken) and enjoyed nothing better than washing dishes, making a fresh rhubarb tart or rinsing out Maire's voluminous white blouses; and that he only drank for appearance's sake. But just when his poetic reputation was at his height, he made the terrible mistake of publishing a collection innocently entitled The Joy of Ironing ("Steam, pass through my shirt/Cleanse it of the long day's dirt . . . ") which dealt in the more humdrum facts of his daily life.
Micheal's reputation as a poet did not survive this joyful celebration of domesticity. To make a new living, he was forced to turn to farming, and as anyone in Mayo will tell you, you can't get less poetic than that.
bglacken@irish-times.ie
