I think I would tend to agree with David's Irish supervisor re Kavanagh,
although it might depend whether I liked him (the supervisor) or not.
I do find Kavanagh very funny, and I do think satire was his major mode
during the fifties. I keep going back to the difference between the
poetry and the prose -- he was a very relaxed, accomplished, prose writer.
No-one seems to object to his prose as they do to his poetry (I think I
was a bit extreme when I said the literati spat on his work, dribbled
might be closer to the mark though I can guess how wounding such a
reception would be). Kavanagh was criticised for the laxness (trying to
play a true note on a slack string) of his poetry; it reminds me of
Robert Lowell's later work and the true dilemma, at some point, of trying
to tell the difference between poetry and prose. I was very interested to
read your post about W.H. Davies below. I think many people do murmur
Kavanagh with love. I also think that he was an extremely sophisticated
poet, though I know I have very little company in that opinion.
Mairead
On Sun, 12 Mar 2000, pain wrote:
> Kavanagh shares something in common with W.H. Davies, both from lowly
> backgrounds, both self-educated, both capable of churning out simple,
> lyrical verse that had an appeal to the ear but was not really
> intellectually stimulating --both knew that they wrote some dreadful verse,
> but both had to make a living from this kind of hack work, though Davies was
> later on in life granted a Civil List pension --he continued to write far
> too much according to critics. I remember being in a bookshop in Hereford
> and encountering a retired Welsh miner who was reading some poetry. During a
> brief conversation he recited some of Davies' poetry. Of course "Leisure":
>
> What is this life, full of care,
> We have no time to stand and stare?--
>
> and some others. That episode made me want to read more about Davies and his
> verse. I managed to get a first edition of his autobiographical fiction of
> his time in Wales --and again an incident that is remarkable --was the scene
> in which children threw stones at Davies while he was on the "tramp". I
> doubt if their lives can redeem their verse, but when I read Kavanagh and
> Davies I think of the difference between the British reception of such
> writers, and the equivalent in Spanish or Italian, where such writers are
> held in high esteem and their poetry still regularly recited or sung.
>
>
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|