On this day in 1967: Patrick Kavanagh died, aged 63

Paul Muldoon

Poet

"I’d never really thought that there were too many differences between poems and songs, especially in the Irish tradition. I was taught by a man called Sean O’Boyle who taught Irish poetry through song. It was perfectly normal that there be no discrepancy between these two forms. I’d another teacher who was very friendly with Patrick Kavanagh and would see him at the weekends in Dublin. He would head out for a few bevvies with Kavanagh and come back and tell us all about it on the Monday morning. Kavanagh, I was thinking this recently, he was a poet, of course, but ‘Raglan Road’, I was always struck by the idea that a poet could also be a songwriter. I don’t think it was simply that this was his best known poem. The fact that Luke Kelly was singing it – it was intriguing. I loved that song, loved it.

"It’s that point where the music and poetry come together – the ballad tradition." (2006)

Brendan Kennelly

Poet

“Anyone who knows Dublin knows there is a really vicious destructive side to the city. For Yeats it was a city where slanderous gossip is chewed as though it was the best of Bewley's brown bread. For Brendan Behan it was a city that filled a man with loneliness, but deprived him of solitude. For Patrick Kavanagh it was ‘malignant Dublin’ that introduced him to the dull humiliating grind of poverty, and forced him to borrow a shilling from a neighbour, pretending the money was for gas when in fact it went to buy a chop for the hungry poet." (1985)

Katherine Lynch

Comedian/actress

“My grandmother and Patrick Kavanagh were brother and sister. Unfortunately I never met him as he passed away before I was born, but his presence was always there in our house when I was growing up – my dad recited Kavanagh all the time. I think my father married my mother because she was a niece of Kavanagh, he was that big of a fan! I thought for a while growing up that Patrick Kavanagh was actually God. You go into other houses and the Bible might be lying around, but there was always a collection of Kavanagh’s poetry on the table in our house.” (2013)

Theo Dorgan,

Writer

"It never occurred to me until I was about 17 or so to write poems. I went to UCC and found I was writing poems and then suddenly got intrigued by it. Years later I read Kavanagh: ‘I dabbled in verses and found they had become my life...’” (2013)

Peter Murphy,

Writer/musician 

"When I first moved to Dublin ten years ago, I found the place illuminated by two unbearably beautiful poems, both written by blow-ins. The first was by Paddy Kavanagh:

"If ever you go to Dublin town
In a hundred years or so
Inquire for me on Baggot Street
And what was I like to know
O he was a queer one,
Fol dol the di do,
He was a queer one,
I tell you.
On Pembroke Road look out for my ghost,
Dishevelled with shoes untied,
Playing through the railings with little children
Whose children have long since died

"To me, those words bespeak the gentleness you rarely hear about Kavanagh, the loneliness of the long distance rhymer, the soul singer singing to his soul. This poem and ‘Canal Bank Walk’ describe the divine side of Dublin in a way that could make a dead man – or a lawyer, for that matter – swoon..." (2001)