Kavanagh - Writer or Poet?

I read tonight that Patrick Kavanagh is ‘regarded as one of the foremost poets of the 20^th century.’ It took me aback a little.

I confess to being familiar with nothing by Patrick Kavanagh except the poem which became the popular song On Raglan Road, a song for which I admit a certain fondness. That fondness is not without reservation, however, as evidenced by the following lines:

On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge

Of a deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s pledge

While not exactly earth-shattering, they’re decent enough. They do at least contain a moderately evocative metaphor and a bit of alliteration. The next line is, however, nothing short of bloody awful:

The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay

How could ‘one of the foremost poets of the 20^th century’ own up to writing a line containing nothing more than a facile reference to an old nursery rhyme, followed by the clumsiest of mixed metaphors? It isn’t even competent, much less inspired. He later refers to the girl who’s let him down as ‘a creature made of clay,’ which is fair enough in the circumstances, I suppose, but he then goes on to categorise himself as ‘an angel.’ Raglan Road is a flawed piece of self-indulgent writing which contains some moderately good lines and some very bad ones. Hardly the work of a ‘foremost poet,’ I think, even though it translates into a very nice song.

But then, when he went along the road of prose instead of poetry, he wrote this:

'Although the literal idea of the peasant is of a farm labouring person, in fact a peasant is all that mass of mankind which lives below a certain level of consciousness.'

That’s an interesting thought and I like it, not least because it places among the peasantry a lot of people who think themselves rather grand. And it’s succinct, which good prose should be.

A contemporary critic said that ‘Kavanagh’s prose is better than his poetry,’ so I think I’ll leave it at that.