Kathmandu :

Bring out a book as soon as you can and let them see you’re a living man. — A Kavanagh

In 1942, shortly after Ireland’s legendary poet Patrick Kavanagh published The Great Hunger, an epoch making long poem about the starvation and spiritual hunger of harsh life in the Irish countryside, he came face to face with a strange reality of being a writer in this world.

A couple of “hefty lads”, he recollects in the Author’s note to his Collected Poems (Martin Brian and O’ Keeffe, London, 1964), came to his lonely house on Pembroke road. One of them, he remembers, had a copy of the poem behind his back. He brought out the book and asked, “Did you write that?” 

“He was a policeman,” reveals Kavanagh and explains how it might seem shocking to the devotee of liberalism if he said the police was right: “For a poet in his true detachment is impervious to policemen. There is something wrong with a work of art, some kinetic vulgarity in it when it is visible to policemen.” 

Kavanagh’s observation is not the only thing that might inspire an Asian reader. In fact very little is known in the subcontinent about this highly admired Irish poet, even in the literary circles. It’s Yeats’ shadow, much like his friend Tagore’s in the West, which looms large in these parts. In 2000, when The Irish Times compiled a list of the most favorite Irish poets, 10 of Kavanagh’s poems were in top 50 and he was considered the second favourite poet behind Yeats.

It might sound strange that I came to know of this great poet through the kind gesture of New Zealand ambassador Graeme Waters. At a book launch in New Delhi, he introduced me to the Irish ambassador, Kieran Dowling who presented me a photocopy of the Author’s note and The Great Hunger from a rare personal collection of Kavanagh’s Collected Poems: 

He stands in the doorway of his house

A ragged sculpture of the wind,

October creaks the rotted mattress

The bedposts fall. No hope. No lust.

The hungry fiend

Screams the apocalypse of clay

In every corner of this land.

Ambassador Dowling also reverently spoke of Kavanagh’s dramatic life — his struggles as a poet and how he literally starved in Dublin. Kavanagh had to borrow a “shilling for gas” instead of using the same coin to buy a chop, he said.

 A close look at Kavanagh’s life reminds me of many eminent Nepali poets. His life and disillusionment with the image of Ireland as an idyllic arcadia is something that should interest our poets immensely.

Kavanagh was born in 1904 in Mucker, Inniskeen, Co Monaghan. His father was a shoemaker and he soon left school to help his father on his little farm. He never got beyond sixth grade. He grew up on this farm like local farmers but dissatisfied with the harsh life, in 1928 moved to London to get in touch with the literary world. Macmillan, London, published his first book, Ploughman and other poems. In 1938, he moved to London but after five months came back to settle in Dublin. Soon his brilliance and ambition of being a great poet made him an enemy of many. As a consequence he had to eke out a living as a journalist. His epic poem The Great Hunger and his classic novel Tarry Flynn was published in 1948, and both the books were initially banned.

In 1954, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and both his lungs were removed. It was during this period of recuperation that Kavanagh rediscovered this lost poetic vision and he entered the spring of his creative life and wrote profusely. At this dead end, he started getting his much deserved acclaim and gave lectures at UCD and travelled to the US. He was honoured to become a judge of the Guinness Awards. Seamus Heaney was the recipient of this award in 1967. 

Unlike Kavanagh, majority of Nepali poets seem to have written literature transparent to the upholders of authority. Only a few like Rimal or Bhupi have been able to walk on the razor’s edge between artistic integrity and ‘kinetic vulgarity’. In fact since the times of Rimal, the Nepali Muse has blatantly prided herself in direct dialogue with national politics. It was Rimal who wrote superbly artistic poems without becoming visible to the authorities. In his real life, though, he practiced radical activism that was only implied in his great works.