Patrick Kavanagh

Patrick Kavanagh was born in County Monaghan and worked on the family farm after leaving school. His earliest poems were printed in newspapers in the late 1920s, among them AE's Irish Statesman. Ploughman and Other Poems was published in 1936 and The Green Fool, an authobiography, in 1938, but was withdrawn after a libel threat from Oliver St John Gogarty. Kavanagh's most famous poem, 'The Great Hunger', appeared in the London-based Horizon in 1942 and later as a pamphlet published by the Cuala Press. It was adapted for the theatre by Tom MacIntyre, and produced at the Abbey Theatre in 1983. After decades of poverty and declining health, Kavanagh experienced a poetic renewal with Recent Poems (1958), followed by Come Dance with Kitty Stobling (1960) and his Collected Poems, published in 1964. Patrick Kavanagh died in Dublin in 1967.