Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of Oct. 21st
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It is the 294th day of the year, leaving 71 days remaining in 2022.
He told his stories about rural Ireland with a realism about the labor, the turmoil, and the poverty surrounding it. He eschewed the romanticism expressed by the Irish nationalist revival that occurred in his lifetime. He said it claimed Dublin as a literary metropolis, and the rest of Ireland was "invented and patented (as) . . . a spiritual entity.
He was having none of it. In his greatest work, The Great Hunger, an epic poem about the life of an Irish farm boy, he made this clear from the beginning.
Clay is the word and clay is the flesh
Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move
Along the side-fall of the hill -- Maguire and his men.
If we watch them an hour is there anything we can prove
Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move
Along the side-fall of the hill -- Maguire and his men.
If we watch them an hour is there anything we can prove
He wrote the poem in 1942.
Kavanagh was one of 10 children of a cobbler and part-time farmer, who grew up in rural County Monaghan, on the Irish border with Northern Ireland. He was mostly self-educated, and while trying his hand at being a writer, reached into his own background for his first novel, Tarry Flynn.
His anti-pastoralism, along with criticism of the church and his fellow writers, earned him a reputation as an iconoclast. But his poetry -- always clear, precise, and evocative -- gradually was accepted as extraordinary, and in the 1950s, he began to find the acclaim he felt he so richly deserved.
Kavanagh died in 1967 in Dublin
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