Kavanagh, Patrick.

Collected Poems [Signed – Limited Edition – One of only 110 copies].

First Edition. London, MacGibbon & Kee, 1964. Octavo (13 cm wide x 24.8 cm high). XV, 202 pages. Hardcover / Original, publisher’s half leather with gilt lettering on spine. In original slipcase. The ugly, olive green half-leather with the usual markings. The Volume itself in absolutely excellent condition with gilt top-edge in formidable glory. The unassuming Volume in the even more unassuming slipcase. The slipcase with rubbing, some minor split to upper and lower spine (of the slipcase NOT the Volume) and some shelfwear to the slipcase as well. Overall a better than very good condition with only minor signs of wear. One of the most sought after books of irish literature. Copies of this book are not available on the international market at the time of cataloging. Auction-results of the past are ping-ponging between 1800€, 2700€ and 3100€ (all including Buyer’s premium).

The ultimate Volume to be in every Patrick Kavanagh – collection, one of the very few books he signed 3 years before his death which have never lost their value to the irish lover of poetry and literature. Included are of course “On Raglan Road (Air: The Dawning of the Day)”, “The Great Hunger”, “Tarry Flynn” and “Come Dance with Kitty Stobling” but also many, many more and the volume does not only include an Index but also a special Register with “First Lines of the Poems”.

The Volume includes in wonderful type:

Part I: “Ploughman and other Poems”:

Ploughman / To a Blackbird / Mary / I may Reap / The Goaat of Slieve Donard / Ascetic / The Intangible / Beech Tree / Soft Ease / A Star / Dark Ireland / To a Child / To a Late Popular / Dreamer / Gold Watch / Twisted Furrows / Worship / Phoenix / After May / The Chase / Four Birds / Blind Dog / Tinker’s Wife / April / To a Child [II] / Inniskeen Road: July Evening / Pioneers / A Wind / At Noon / March / Morning /

Part II: “The Great Hunger” and other Poems:

To The Man after the Harrow / Plough Horses / From Tarry Flynn / My Room / Shancoduff / Pygmalion / Peace / Beyond the Headlines / Pursuit of an Ideal / In the Same Mood / The Great Hunger /

Part III: from ‘A Soul for Sale’:

Pegasus / Father Mat / Temptation in Harvest / Bluebells for Love / Advent / A Christmas Childhood / Memory of my Father / The Long Garden / Primrose / Art McCooey / Spraying the Potatoes / Ethical / Sanctity / Candida / War and Peace / Stony Grey Soil / Memory of Brother Michael / A Wreath for Tom Moore’s Statue /

Part IV: Later Poems inclduing ‘Come Dance with Kitty Stobling’

The Road to Hate / The Paddiad / Jungle / The Defeated / Bank Holiday / Adventures in the Bohemian Jungle / Irish Stew / The Christmas Mummers / Tale of Two Cities / Spring Day / Who Killed James Joyce ? / House Party to Celebrate the Destruction of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland / Joyce’s Ulysses / Portrait of the Artist / Leave them Alone /

The Index of Poems then continues with a new Numeration and more Poems are listed:

1.
Auditors In / Innocence / Cyrano de Bergerac / Ante-Natal Dream / To be Dead / Prelude / On Looking into E.V.Rieu’s Homer / Kerr’s Ass / Epic / On Reading A Book On Common Wild Flowers / I Had a Future / The Rowley Mile / Wet Evening In April / The Hero / If Ever You Go To Dublin Town / Narcissus and the Women / Intimate Parnassus / God in Woman / Nineteen Fifty-Four / After Forty Years of Age / Having Confessed /

2.
Canal Bank Walk / Lines Written On A Set On The Grand Canal, Dublin, ‘Erected to the Memory of Mrs. Dermot O’Brien’ / Dear Folks / Song at Fifty / The Hospital / Is / To Hell With Common Sense / Freedom / Requiem for a Mill / Live in a Meadow / Yellow Vestment / Come Dance with Kitty Stobling / Miss Universe / The One / October / Winter / The Self-Slaved / In Memory of My Mother / Question to Life /

3.
Lecture Hall / Living in the Country: I / Living in the Country: II / Mermaid Tavern / One Wet Summer / The Gambler: A Ballet with Words / The Gambler: A Ballet / News Item / A Summer Morning Walk / A Ballad / No Social Conscience / AN Insult / On Raglan Road / Literary Adventures / Sensational Disclosures ! (Kavanagh Tells All) / The Same Again / Thank You, Thank You / About Reason, Maybe / That Garage / In Blinking Blankness: Three Efforts /

Index of First Lines:



Patrick Kavanagh (21 October 1904 – 30 November 1967) was an Irish poet and novelist. His best-known works include the novel Tarry Flynn, and the poems “On Raglan Road” and “The Great Hunger”. He is known for his accounts of Irish life through reference to the everyday and commonplace.
Kavanagh’s first published work appeared in 1928 in the Dundalk Democrat and the Irish Independent. Kavanagh had encountered a copy of the Irish Statesman, edited by George William Russell, who published under the pen name AE and was a leader of the Irish Literary Revival. Russell at first rejected Kavanagh’s work but encouraged him to keep submitting, and he went on to publish verses by Kavanagh in 1929 and 1930. This inspired the farmer to leave home and attempt to further his aspirations. In 1931, he walked 80 miles (abt. 129 kilometres) to meet Russell in Dublin, where Kavanagh’s brother was a teacher. Russell gave Kavanagh books, among them works by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Victor Hugo, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Robert Browning, and became Kavanagh’s literary adviser. Kavanagh joined Dundalk Library and the first book he borrowed was The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot.

Kavanagh’s first collection, Ploughman and Other Poems, was published in 1936. It is notable for its realistic portrayal of Irish country life, free of the romantic sentiment often seen at the time in rural poems, a trait he abhorred. Published by Macmillan in its series on new poets, the book expressed a commitment to colloquial speech and the unvarnished lives of real people, which made him unpopular with the literary establishment. Two years after his first collection was published he had yet to make a significant impression. The Times Literary Supplement described him as “a young Irish poet of promise rather than of achievement,” and The Spectator commented that, “like other poets admired by A.E., he writes much better prose than poetry. Mr Kavanagh’s lyrics are for the most part slight and conventional, easily enjoyed but almost as easily forgotten.″

In 1938 Kavanagh went to London. He remained there for about five months. The Green Fool, a loosely autobiographical novel, was published in 1938 and Kavanagh was accused of libel. Oliver St. John Gogarty sued Kavanagh for his description of his first visit to Gogarty’s home: “I mistook Gogarty’s white-robed maid for his wife or his mistress; I expected every poet to have a spare wife.” Gogarty, who had taken offence at the close coupling of the words “wife” and “mistress”, was awarded £100 in damages. The book, which recounted Kavanagh’s rural childhood and his attempts to become a writer, received international recognition and good reviews. However, it was also claimed to be somewhat ‘anti-Catholic’ in tone, to which Kavanagh reacted by demanding that the work be prominently displayed in Dublin bookshop windows.

The outbreak of World War II (known as The Emergency in the Republic of Ireland) had a damaging effect on the emerging careers of some Irish writers, including Flann O’Brien as well as Kavanagh as they lost access to their publishers in London and reprints of their books could not be arranged. The Republic, which was neutral during the war, shared a border with Northern Ireland (which, as part of the United Kingdom was involved on the Allied side). There were smuggling opportunities on the border, especially in County Monaghan, which would have been more lucrative than writing at this time.

In 1939 Kavanagh settled in Dublin. In his biography John Nemo describes Kavanagh’s encounter with the city’s literary world: “he realized that the stimulating environment he had imagined was little different from the petty and ignorant world he had left. He soon saw through the literary masks many Dublin writers wore to affect an air of artistic sophistication. To him, such men were dandies, journalists, and civil servants playing at art. His disgust was deepened by the fact that he was treated as the literate peasant he had been rather than as the highly talented poet he believed he was in the process of becoming”.

During this time he met John Betjeman who was based in Dublin during the Emergency nominally as a press attaché but also working for British intelligence. Betjeman, impressed by Kavanagh’s wide range of social contacts, his ability to get invited to events, and his political ambiguity, tried to recruit him as a British spy.

In 1942 he published his long poem The Great Hunger, which describes the privations and hardship of the rural life he knew well. Although it was rumoured at the time that all copies of Horizon, the literary magazine in which it was published, were seized by the Garda Síochána, Kavanagh denied that this had occurred, saying later that he was visited by two Gardaí at his home (probably in connection with an investigation of Horizon under the Special Powers Act). Written from the viewpoint of a single peasant against the historical background of famine and emotional despair, the poem is often held by critics to be Kavanagh’s finest work. It set out to counter the saccharine romanticising of the Irish literary establishment in its view of peasant life. Richard Murphy in The New York Times Book Review described it as “a great work” and Robin Skelton in Poetry praised it as “a vision of mythic intensity”.

In 1949 Kavanagh began to write a monthly “Diary” for Envoy, a literary publication founded by John Ryan, who became a lifelong friend and benefactor. Envoy’s offices were at 39 Grafton Street, but most of the journal’s business was conducted in a nearby pub, McDaid’s, which Kavanagh subsequently adopted as his local. Through Envoy he came into contact with a circle of young artists and intellectuals including Anthony Cronin, Patrick Swift, John Jordan and the sculptor Desmond MacNamara, whose bust of Kavanagh is in the Irish National Writers Museum. Kavanagh often referred to these times as the period of his “poetic rebirth”.

In 1952 Kavanagh published his own journal, Kavanagh’s Weekly: A Journal of Literature and Politics, in conjunction with, and financed by, his brother Peter. It ran to some 13 issues, from 12 April to 5 July 1952.

Turning point: Kavanagh begins to receive acclaim:

In 1955 Macmillan rejected a typescript of poems by Kavanagh, which left the poet very depressed. Patrick Swift, on a visit to Dublin in 1956, was invited by Kavanagh to look at the typescript. Swift then arranged for the poems to be published in the English literary journal “Nimbus” (19 poems were published). This proved a turning point and Kavanagh began receiving the acclaim that he had always felt he deserved. His next collection, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling, was directly linked to the mini-collection in Nimbus.

Between 1959 and 1962 Kavanagh spent more time in London, where he contributed to Swift’s X magazine. During this period Kavanagh occasionally stayed with the Swifts in Westbourne Terrace. He gave lectures at University College Dublin and in the United States, represented Ireland at literary symposiums, and became a judge of the Guinness Poetry Awards.

In London, he often stayed with his publisher, Martin Green, and Green’s wife Fiona, in their house in Tottenham Street, Fitzrovia. It was at this time that Martin Green produced Kavanagh’s Collected Poems (1964) with prompting from Patrick Swift and Anthony Cronin”. In the introduction Kavanagh wrote: “A man innocently dabbles in words and rhymes, and finds that it is his life.” (Wikipedia)

• Keywords: Catalogue – Poetry of the 20th Century · Catalogue Irish History Seven – Irish Literature – Poetry – Music – Theatre · Catalogue No.10 – International Literature · Catalogue No.30 – Poetry · Irish Literature – 20th Century · Irish Literature – Rare · Irish Poetry · Irish Poetry – Rare · Limited Edition · Poetry · Poetry – Rare · Signed
• Language: English
• Inventory Number: 32049AB

EUR 2.400,--