'Epic', Patrick Kavanagh (Critical Essay‪)‬

'Epic' is so hard-wired into postwar Irish writing that it seems as natural and immovable an event as Ulysses or 'Easter 1916'. (1) I studied it, but not the other texts, at secondary school for my Leaving Certificate and then studied all three at university. At that point, Kavanagh seemed the odd tuan out, lacking authority, lacking gravitas, lacking a bibliography. His critics (and how little and unsustained is the critical engagement with his work!) used words like 'pivotal' and 'enabling': a generous reading made Kavanagh's work the invisible foundation for other people's houses but without an independent existence of its own. Following their example, I missed entirely his ingenuity and originality, and the variety of his influences, grasping only his 'importance' for a monolithic 'Irish Studies'. 'Importance' is a keyword in 'Epic'. This short poem, which begins, 'I have lived in important places, times/When great events were decided,' has been central to Kavanagh's immense popularity and, at the expense of the poem's availability as a live resource, has become a touchstone for a kind of writing and an attitude to writing. His own prose interventions are partially responsible for this critical foreclosure on his work. His arguments for the superiority of the 'parochial' to the 'provincial' world-view are applied to the poem and read as usefully proto-post-colonial. John Montague and Seamus Deane followed this line by reading the poem as a 'a liberation into ignorance' (2) and subsequent critics use it as a starting point to explore the work of Brian Friel, John McGahern, Eavan Boland, and dozens of other writers. (3) 'Epic' hospitably entertains such readings but also exceeds them. It has provided a template for at least three different kinds of poem with its innovative choice of subject matter and style, its use of history, authority, and rhyme, and its diverse engagement with its predecessors.