The Trials of Patrick Kavanagh

The year 1954 could not have gone much worse for Patrick Kavanagh. In this annus horribilis, Kavanagh lost his very public court case against the Leader, a biweekly periodical he had sued for libel over an anonymous article titled “Profile: Mr. Patrick Kavanagh.” Denied a financial windfall by the jury’s verdict, the fifty-year-old Kavanagh spent the remainder of the year unemployed, mysteriously ill, and relatively impoverished. The new year brought little good news. In February, the poet was diagnosed with lung cancer; in March, his left lung and one of his ribs were surgically removed.¹ Kavanagh’s sonnet “Nineteen Fifty-Four,” published in Nimbus in the summer of 1956, gives voice to the poet’s bewilderment in the face of these accumulating trials, to his creeping sense that the reading public in midcentury Dublin remained indifferent to these private tribulations, and to his anxiety over what lyric poetry meant in such a place and at such a time: “Nineteen Fifty-Four hold on till I try / To formulate some theory about you. A personal matter: / My lamp of contemplation you sought to shatter, / To leave me groping in madness under a low sky.”²

“Nineteen Fifty-Four” gains thematic momentum from the speaker’s admission that he remains unable to discover a conceptual framework—“some mystical patter / That would organize a perspective from this hellish scatter”—the absence of which precipitates a loosening-up of the sonnet form and a breakdown in the lyric voice, evident in the final line of the first stanza: “Everywhere I look a part of me is exiled from the I” (CP 211). Plainly stated, this sonnet testifies to Kavanagh’s belief that he had suffered an exhausting cross-examination by an unsympathetic public who, in the lyric speaker’s desolate view, did “not care whether I curse or weep” (CP 212).

Readers in midcentury Dublin might well have been unsympathetic toward Kavanagh’s libel action against the Leader. Some thought Kavanagh’s claim an exercise in the “wasteful business” of “enacting his own legend”; others thought it the most ill-advised voyage of the poet’s career; still others thought it an extreme measure taken by an unemployable poet who was desperate for money.³ These opinions, well-rehearsed in much previous writing about the libel suit, are true to a degree but limited; the tale of the trial has usually been told from the perspective of Kavanagh’s experience.⁴ More broadly examined, the 1954 trial reveals itself to be a literary to-do and public theater at its best, bringing into sharper focus the nuanced interplay among literary celebrity, bohemian Dublin, the politics of cultural criticism, postwar isolationism, and economic need in midcentury Ireland, a time when Kavanagh and his literary cohort suffered from “the common experience of neglect—financial and critical,” as John Ryan observes.⁵ In many ways, the trial was born from and motivated by this neglect, which Kavanagh felt deeply; before the trial, he wrote that his diary should be titled “the Journal of an Absolutely Neglected Writer.”⁶

Many things were on trial in the winter of 1954, the foremost of which was Kavanagh’s belief that the poet, however neglected, should be sacrosanct and therefore unassailable by mean-spirited, dull-witted auditors—a belief he most likely inherited from W. B. Yeats. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, these feelings about the hallowed place of the poet in Ireland, paired with Kavanagh’s disparaging remarks about Dublin’s lack of a metropolitan attitude, calcified into some haughty work, delivered to readers who throughout the decade were living in perhaps “the most intellectually stultifying society in northern Europe.”⁷ Antoinette Quinn records that Kavanagh “regarded himself primarily as a poet and from the mid-1940s as the Irish poet.”⁸ Such self-assured claims need to be accompanied by a knack for public relations and an ability to transform into a Yeatsian “smiling public man”—an ability Kavanagh simply did not possess. Consequently, before the trial, Kavanagh cultivated some paradoxical personae in his lyric and verse work, which tended...