poet whose long poem The Great Hunger put him in the front rank of modern Irish poets.

Kavanagh was self-educated and worked for a while on a farm in his home county, which provided the setting for a novel, Tarry Flynn (1948), which later was dramatized and presented at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. After moving to Dublin, where he spent most of his life as a journalist, Kavanagh wrote The Great Hunger (1942), an epic about an Irish farm boy, containing impassioned satirical passages that recall D.H. Lawrence. Two volumes of verse followed—A Soul for Sale (1947) and Come Dance with Kitty Stobling (1960). His Collected Poems appeared in 1964 and Collected Pruse in 1967. An early work of autobiography was A Green Fool (1939).

Kavanagh achieved a reputation in Ireland and abroad not only for his stark anti-pastoral poetry but also for his criticism of his contemporaries and of the church.