Remembering Kavanagh

Madam, - I was interested to read Alice Leahy's view of Patrick Kavanagh as outsider (Oct 23rd)

Madam, - I was interested to read Alice Leahy's view of Patrick Kavanagh as outsider (Oct 23rd). Such he was, both in Dublin and in his native Co Monaghan. In the early 1940s he came to stay for about six months in Mrs Kenny's guest house, 19 Raglan Road, Ballsbridge, where I was a fellow-guest.

It was there he met the beautiful medical student who inspired his poem On Raglan Road.

Most of the people in Mrs Kenny's were what are labelled lower-middle class, all of them conscious of being "respectable" citizens of that era.

I appreciated Kavanagh as a poet and so did one other person, an Irish language scholar from Co Cork (Neans Cronin).

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On the whole he was detested and considered a buffoon.

It never occurred to any of us that he was desperately poor and that bad manners were his way of protest against a world in which he felt ill at ease and rejected.

He bitterly condemned his Irish literary contemporaries - especially the poets - reserving praise for three Englishmen: the poets, Auden and Betjeman, and the publisher Harold Macmillan (later British prime minister) whom he called "a real gentleman".

He therefore fulfilled Dr Johnson's dictum that the Irish are a fair people because they never speak well of one another. - Yours, etc.,

ROBERT GREACEN,

Member of Aosdána,

Sandymount,

Dublin 4.