‘Whatever I Say Goes’: Cultural Relations and Patrick Kavanagh's Global Parochialism

Abstract

This essay refigures conventional partitions of local and global spaces by uncovering the fate of rural labour, as it became the showpiece of an Irish state attempting to attract American material support after the Second World War. As Ireland advertised its rural land in an aggressive drive to attract American tourists – referring to itself as ‘Ireland of the Welcomes’ – Patrick Kavanagh found his local expertise and the focus of The Great Hunger becoming everyone’s business. This essay argues that it is by considering Kavanagh’s competition with agencies of cultural export, especially in the pages of his self-published newspaper Kavanagh’s Weekly and his lyrics of the 1950s, that we can comprehend his late redefinition of the long poem as a genre paradoxically too small to match the even longer reach of what he called ‘this superstructure of finance, this fairyland.’