Kavanagh scholars like myself have long been aware of the existence of a large corpus of his unpublished poems. The O'Sullivan papers in the Trinity College library, where Dr Frank Shovlin found Ungrateful Singer, is an early port of call for researchers.
Seumas O'Sullivan, the editor of the Dublin Magazine, was the poet's principal Irish publisher in the 1930s. O'Sullivan accepted three poems in 1931 and from 1932 until 1939 he published one or two clusters of poems every year.
Though he turned down Pygmalion, he was quite a discerning editor and published two of Kavanagh's best 1930s poems, Sanctity and Shancoduff (which he specifically requested). By 1940 Kavanagh felt he had outgrown the Dublin Magazine and moved to The Bell.
Kavanagh's literary career took off in 1930 and throughout the decade he was prolific, producing far more than the market could absorb. At his death in 1967, there were more than 170 unpublished 1930s poems.
Since Kavanagh only published about 160 poems altogether in his lifetime (discounting the light jingles in his City Commentary column in the Irish Press), his discarded 1930s verse takes up as many pages as his entire published oeuvre.
Peter Kavanagh collected more than 80 "lost" 1930s poems in his Complete Poems (The Peter Kavanagh Hand Press, New York, 1972), mostly from two collections, The Seed and the Soil and To Anna Quinn in the National Library.
This leaves three unpublished manuscript collections and seven unpublished poems in a fourth collection, in addition to Ungrateful Singer, 86 poems in all, not counting variant versions and drafts. Many of these poems are of quite low quality and there are certainly no masterpieces among them.
"All unpub all rightly so," he noted on one batch.
The survival of such a quantity of middling to indifferent early verse poses a problem. How or where to publish?
Should one bring out a collection of "lost" 1930s verse which might be of interest to Kavanagh enthusiasts? Publish a more complete Complete Poems where the unfortunate reader would have to wade through about 200 1930s pieces with only a few good poems for consolation en route? Dribble a couple of poems to about 40 magazines or newspapers?
The poem Dr Shovlin has salvaged from the files of Envoy - now entitled O Verse - is more deserving of retrieval than Ungrateful Singer, though it compares unfavourably with the quality the poet was achieving by 1951 in Kerr's Ass, Auditors In and Epic. Unpublished post1940 Kavanagh poems have a rarity value; I had been saving them for my biography [of Kav anagh] in November, but in this case Dr Shovlin has beaten me to it fair and square.
From 1950, Kavanagh experimented with a new kind of direct, conversational verse in which he talks in rhyme about his private life, taking the reader into his confidence and where, as here, he is sometimes humorous about his problems. His images are now consciously up to date and urban. Marriage was on his mind in 1949/50 when he was 45, but this is the only time to my knowledge that he wished for a childless marriage or one without middle-class domestic trappings.
In Auditors In he longs for "a car, a big suburban house" and in Irish Stew he is quite satiric about those who are out to deprive him of "domesticity, wife, house, car." He may have decided against publishing that because the woman he was courting just then ("the friend at the door"?) would probably have found it offensive.
That he decided against publishing this piece adds to its interest, because it probably reveals some of the constraints he experienced in writing his new "candid" confessional verses.
Dr Antoinette Quinn, editor of Patrick Kavanagh: Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics), is the author of Another Me: A Biography of Patrick Kavanagh, to be published by Gill and Macmillan in November.