The Mystical Imagination of Patrick Kavanagh by Una Agnew Columba Press 285pp, £19.99
In a classic New Yorker cartoon, a large, tired and emotional gentleman in a nightclub is addressed by a young female companion in the immortal words: "But you're a mystic, Mr Ryan, all Irishmen are mystics!"
My dictionary offers various meanings for "mystic" and its derivatives, but I fear that the (secondary) definition of mysticism as "fogginess and unreality of thought (with suggestions of mist)" best matches the popular view. Qualified by the adjective "Eastern", it provided those of us who came to immaturity in the Sixties with a convenient substitute for thinking; more recently, it has come closer to home as "Celtic spirituality".
Of course, only a fool or a philistine would deny that the great world religions, of the East and the West, have produced authentic mysticisms and authentic mystics, whose influence has opened the doors of perception to genuine enquirers and disciples. As to the discernment of a mystical element in the Irish and Welsh religious traditions, I should hesitate to judge what so far is only partial, if suggestive, evidence. And it must be said that the over-facile use of the word "Celtic" does not help.
Even this serious and well-documented study of Patrick Kavanagh and his work may be faulted on this latter point. But I hasten to say that Una Agnew's approach to the question of his "mystical imagination" is happily free from "fogginess".
Kavanagh himself professed "a belief in poetry as a mystical thing and a dangerous thing". And proceeding from his declaration, she tests his work for "mystical development" following a triple process of "Awakening, Purification, Illumination", first proposed by the Neo-Platonists, and adopted by the Anglican writer, Evelyn Underhill.
She makes a good case, but for my part I am not persuaded. I have no difficulty in seeing Kavanagh as a major poet in the line of the fili of early Christian Ireland. Like them, he saw all creation as of God, and rejoiced in it, and saw the Creator "in the bits and pieces of everyday". Like theirs, his sense of incarnation was complete, and he was never happy with that disparagement of the "earthy" from human and animal sexuality to "the hedges and dust of the road", which was a sad fruit of the "reform" of Irish Catholicism which began a hundred and fifty years ago.
Una Agnew quotes Kavanagh's Weekly on this: "Somewhere in the nineteenth century, an anti-life heresy entered religion." Or, more powerfully, in The Great Hunger:
In the gap there's a bush weighted with borders like morality. The fools of life bleed if they climb over .. .
Church "reform" was of course not the only cause of the social and cultural blight which, following hard on that of the Great Famine, deformed and soured what was left of life in the Irish countryside. The decline of the Irish language signalled the death of a Christian culture which had always retained, and been nourished by, a rich "pagan" subsoil. The vacuum left in Irish life was too easily filled by imported religiosity and moralising, in the shape of Italianate devotional novelties and Victorian models of behaviour. Still, in Kavanagh's Monaghan "the ghost of a culture haunted the snub-nosed hills".
The poet's awareness and appropriation of this fragmented tradition is well chronicled by Una Agnew, and she recognises in it a source of his own vision, his "instinct for epiphanies", and she notes that while Joyce (as Richard Ellmann points out) did not see "epiphany" in specifically Christian terms, in Kavanagh, as with Hopkins's "illuminations", there is always a sense of divine, even Trinitarian, inspiration.
Yet sometimes when the sun comes through a gap These man see God the Father in a tree: The Holy Spirit in the rising sap, And Christ will be the green leaves that will come At Easter from the seated and guarded tomb.
This indeed is the ancient, high tradition of the Deer's Cry and the poems of Blathmac and all the monks and ceili De who sang "the God in the tree", a tradition which survived, with the language in which it was formed, through MacAingil, and Tadhg Gaelach, and Raftery's "Repentance", down to Kavanagh's near-contemporary, Sean O Riordain. But Kavanagh was the first to carry it intact into the new language.
Does all or any of this point to a "mystical imagination"? I repeat, I am not persuaded. Una Agnew is properly sensitive to the relationship between poetry and mysticism. But, for all that - and, obviously, some of the world's mystics have used verse as a medium of expression - I am convinced that the poet and the mystic follow different roads to reality. As different as either is to the way of the scientist or the philosopher. I cannot see that one should need to postulate a mystical dimension to Kavanagh's many-faceted genius and vision.
But in her study of the turbulent imagination of this turbulent man, Una Agnew has succeeded in unveiling the still centre. In doing this she has placed us all in her debt.