Patrick Kavanagh was born on 21 October 1904 in rural Inniskeen, County Monaghan. He left school at the age of 13 to work on the family farm and pursue an apprenticeship with his father, a shoemaker. He would soon give up the shoemaking, but continued working on the farm even after his first collection of verse, Ploughman and Other Poems, was published by Macmillan in 1936. Ploughman was unique in its treatment of Irish rural life, as Kavanagh eschewed the romanticized, fictionalized accounts of the Irish country that the Irish Literary Revival greatly relied on. His long poem ‘The Great Hunger’, published in 1942, provided an un-sentimental, semi-autobiographical account of the life of the bachelor farmer. By the late 1940’s, Kavanagh had become disillusioned with the rural themes and elements of his earlier work, and his focus turned to Dublin, where he began a change in direction from rural realism to contemporary urban poetry. After treatment for lung cancer in 1955, Kavanagh spent much of his recovery on the banks of Dublin’s Grand Canal, which became for him the site of his spiritual and literary rebirth. Kavanagh noted in his 1964 book Self-Portrait, “For many a good-looking year I wrought hard at versing but I would say that, as a poet, I was born in or about nineteen-fifty-five, the place of my birth being the banks of the Grand Canal.” The poetry that followed was noticeably more spiritual and appreciative of nature, and removed from the anger and bitterness that marked his poems previously. In this new wave, Kavanagh began to finally receive the acclaim he always felt he had deserved. In the introduction to his Collected Poems (1964) Kavanagh wrote: “A man innocently dabbles in words and rhymes, and finds that it is his life.” He died in 1967. He is regarded as one of Ireland’s most-loved poets after W.B. Yeats.
Patrick Kavanagh's first album Poems: 1929-1938 released on Thu Jan 01 1970.
The most popular album by Patrick Kavanagh's is Poems: 1929-1938
Patrick Kavanagh's first song Address to an Old Wooden Gate released on Thu Jan 01 1970.