Towards a poetics of dwelling: Patrick Kavanagh’s countryside

Abstract

Patrick Kavanagh’s poetry has often been studied in relation to questions of identity and sense of place both in response and reaction to the metanarrative of Irishness popularised during the Irish Literary Revival. New scholarship on Irish poetry, however, has moved beyond viewing Kavanagh’s portrayal of the countryside as an antidote to the Yeatsian depiction of the peasant and rural landscape and has made possible a re-reading of Kavanagh’s sense of place from an ecocritical perspective. Following the interdisciplinary trend in studying literature in relation to the environment, this paper focuses on the notion of place as a complex socio-environmental entity and addresses Kavanagh’s depiction of rural Ireland in his early poetry and novels from the perspective of dwelling. The aim is to highlight the missing element of temporality in reference to the landscape and how Kavanagh’s direct engagement with his local community and attention to detail offer a poetics of dwelling, wherein the dweller is an inseparable part of a dynamic and temporal environment.