"All the Answers": The Influence of Auden on Kavanagh's Poetic Development

We are used to reading Patrick Kavanagh's poetry with reference to literary standpoints for which Kavanagh himself had little time. We see him as an exemplary corrective to the pieties of the Irish Literary Revival, as instructively hostile to the politics of literary Dublin. Our approval of him often takes a negative form because we have such a sharp idea, thanks to his poems and essays, of what he stood against. When our approval takes the positive form of endorsing what he stood for, it is articulated hazily. We think of him—vaguely, sweepingly—as a literary innocent wiping the slate of Irish poetry clean, ushering in a poetic Year Zero to the new state. Seamus Deane's description of the typical poem we encounter in Kavanagh's first book Ploughman and Other Poems illustrates this point well. "The poem is translucent. Kavanagh emerges as he entered, still persistently himself. He is a bare-faced poet. No masks. In this he is revolutionary."¹

The picture of Kavanagh as unaffected and, by extension, uninfluenced tends to be ahistorical and has led to some awkward critical emphases. To take one example, the collection of essays Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930 s explicitly excludes Kavanagh despite the obvious modernist procedures of The Great Hunger.² Admittedly, Kavanagh's most important long poem was composed in 1941, but the editors do not cite this date as a reason to exclude him. The tendency to perceive Kavanagh as having been "naive" and "uninfluenced" while, at the same time, characterizing such others of the period as Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin, and Thomas McGreevey as positively influenced and smartly up-to-date distorts a fair picture of the period.

Kavanagh's work, especially The Great Hunger, relates to the second wave of English modernism associated with—indeed instigated by—W. H. Auden. This version of modernism, highly influential in the 1930s, was notably anxious to connect with a general audience. Therefore, Kavanagh is partly unoriginal. He is a poet sharply aware of, and anxious about, his influences. Kavanagh's undisguised admiration for the work of W. H. Auden crops up many times in his prose. In his essay "Pietism and Poetry," for example, he places Auden in the company of Yeats and Eliot.³ Not so daring a move, but in "Literature and the Universities" he goes still further and puts Auden in the company of Milton and Shakespeare (Pruse 236-40). In his most considered treatment of the English poet, the essay "Auden and the Creative Mind," comparisons with Shakespeare are repeatedly made: "Shakespeare and Auden in common give the impression that they have found a formula and that they could employ ghosts to turn out their particular line till there would be no need for another poet for a long time" (Pruse 250-51). Not only does the essay strikingly affirm the value of Auden's work, it also holds his poetry out as a corrective to the influence of Yeats. A further piece emphasizing the instructive cosmopolitanism of the English poet coopts Auden into the pantheon of Irish writers:

Those 'Ireland' writers, who are still writing . . . could not see that the writers of Ireland were no longer Corkery and O'Connor and the others but Auden and George Barker—anyone anywhere who at least appreciated, if he could not cure, their misfortune.

(Pruse 266)

Despite Kavanagh's loud acknowledgement of his admiration for Auden, Auden's influence on Kavanagh's work has been little remarked on and less analyzed. There have been few incentives for politically minded Irish criticism, either revisionist or nationalist, to read Kavanagh's career in the light of Auden's influence. Typically, critical acknowledgements of Auden's influence are made in passing and are relatively unfocused. The major critical biography by Antoinette Quinn acknowledges Auden's influence a few times, but does not treat the subject in detail. While she recognizes that by 1941 Auden was a general influence on Kavanagh's poetry, she observes that with respect to ". . . The Great Hunger this new literary influence is unrecognisable...