I want you to picture a poet and be honest with
me here. Okay. When I say important literary
figure from the 20th century, what image pops
into your head? Oh, that's easy. It's someone
in a tweed jacket, probably has elbow patches.
Right. Sitting in a dusty library, Oxford, Cambridge,
Trinity College. Totally detached from the real
world, maybe sipping a sherry. That's the archetype,
isn't it? The ivory tower intellectual, the person
who writes about life without ever really getting
their hands dirty. Exactly. But today we are
talking about a man who takes that image and
essentially throws a brick through the stained
glass window of that ivory tower. That is a very
good way to put it. We are talking about a man
who spent his youth not in a lecture hall, but,
you know, in a ditch. A man who was an apprentice
shoemaker, a subsistence farmer, and, this is
my favorite part, the goalkeeper for his local
Gaelic football team in rural Ireland. A goalkeeper
who, I might add, probably spent half the match
composing verses in his head while waiting for
the ball to come down the pitch. Right. But here's
the contradiction that hooks me. This same man,
this rural cobbler, walks 80 miles. 80 miles?
On foot just to knock on a door and meet a literary
hero. He gets courted by British spies during
World War II. Which is a story in itself. And
then in a bizarre twist of modern pop culture,
his poetry ends up causing a backstage brawl
involving Russell Crowe at the BAFTAs. It is
without a doubt. One of the most volatile and
fascinating trajectories in literary history.
We are talking about Patrick Cavanaugh. We are.
And while the Russell Crowe connection is a great
cocktail party story, and we will definitely
get to that, the real mission of this deep dive
is much more substantial. We're looking at a
stack of sources here. Biographies, critical
essays, even some legal transcripts. And the
narrative arc is just wild. But the core theme
seems to be a battle over reality. That's the
perfect way to put it. It's a battle over how
we see the world. Kavanaugh basically dismantled
the Celtic twilight. Okay, you have to explain
that. What was the Celtic twilight? Well, you
have to remember, before Kavanaugh, the literary
view of Ireland was dominated by W .B. Yeats
and his circle. And it was all... mist and fairies
and noble peasants who spoke in ancient riddles.
It was very romantic, but it was a fantasy. And
Cavanaugh hated that. He loathed it. He saw it
as a lie. He wanted to replace that romanticism
with something gritty, something he called the
parochial. Now, hold on. Parochial is usually
an insult. If I call someone parochial, I'm saying
they're small minded. They don't know anything
outside their tiny village. And that is exactly
where Kavanaugh flips the script. He redefined
that word completely. For him, being parochial
was actually the highest form of art. It's a
complex idea, and we're going to spend some time
unpacking it because it really changes how you
see your own life, not just his poetry. Okay,
so we've got libel suits, we've got lung cancer,
a poetic rebirth on the banks of a canal, and
we've got a gladiator fighting a TV producer.
It's quite a life. Let's start at the very beginning,
the soil and the shoemaker. To really get Kavanaugh,
you have to smell the mud of Iniskeen, County
Monaghan. He was born there on October 21, 1904.
And when we say rural, we don't mean a nice cottage
with Wi -Fi. We mean rural. We mean subsistence.
He was the fourth of ten children. His father,
James Cavanaugh, was a cobbler, a shoemaker,
and a small farmer. His mother, Bridget Quinn,
ran the household. It was a hard, repetitive
life. A tough life. But right off the bat, looking
at the family history, there's a crack in the
foundation. Cavanaugh wasn't even their real
name. I saw this in the notes and I had to reread
it. This involves his grandfather, right? A schoolteacher
named Keveny. That's right. His grandfather was
a schoolteacher in the west of Ireland. But the
records are frustratingly vague. They just mentioned
a scandal. A scandal. That sounds ominous. It
does. We don't know exactly what happened, but
it was significant enough that he was forced
to leave the area and he never taught in a national
school again. Wow. So it must have been serious
for that time period. It must have been. He moved
to Tullamore. Raised a family. But the shadow
of that scandal must have followed them. Because
when it came time for Patrick's baptism, the
local priest in Inniskeen, he didn't just baptize
him. What do you mean? He changed the family
name in the registry. He changed Keveny to Kavanaugh.
Wait, the priest just decided, I'm changing your
name, and that was it? Unilaterally. Yeah. Just
wrote it in the book. That speaks volumes about
the power dynamic in rural Ireland at the turn
of the century. The priest wasn't just a spiritual
leader. He was like the administrator of your
identity. Absolutely. And that authority, the
looning presence of the church, is something
Patrick would wrestle with his entire life. So
despite this kind of strange start with the name,
the family was industrious. They weren't destitute.
No, not at all. In fact, they believed in education
as a way out. His brother Peter became a university
professor. His sisters became teachers and nurses.
They were all about upward mobility. But Patrick,
he zagged where they zigged. He dropped out.
He left school at age 13 after finishing sixth
class. And that was it. That was the end of his
formal education. Thirteen years old, so he's
just thrown into the workforce. He was apprenticed
to his father. He sat on the bench mending shoes.
And he went out into the fields to work the land.
And this is where we have to address a very specific
and frankly kind of dark definition Kavanaugh
had. Okay. He was a peasant. He lived a peasant's
life. But he hated the mindset of the peasant.
This was the quote that really stuck out to me.
He said, a peasant isn't just a farm laborer.
He defined a peasant as all that mass of mankind
which lives below a certain level of consciousness.
It's brutal, isn't it? It sounds like he's describing
a zombie movie. They live in the dark cave of
the unconscious and they scream when they see
the light. I mean, that is not a man who is happy
with his neighbors. It's Plato's cave. That's
exactly what he's channeling. He felt that the
people around him were just watching shadows
on the wall. He later said that the real poverty
of his childhood wasn't about the lack of money.
What was it then? It was the lack of enlightenment.
He called it the fog of unknowing. The fog of
unknowing. That's a terrifying phrase. It is.
He felt this fog was suffocating him. He felt
trapped in a community that didn't examine itself,
that didn't look up at the stars, that just worked
and slept and prayed. So you have this image
of him. He's the goalkeeper for the Iniskin Gaelic
football team. Which is such a great visual.
The poet in the goal mouth. Imagine him standing
there, guarding the net. or bending over a boot
in his father's shop. And internally, he is screaming.
He is desperate to claw his way out of that fog.
He wants consciousness. He wants the light. That's
the core of his early struggle. And his ladder
out of the fog wasn't school, because it already
left. It had to be literature. But surely in
1920s, Inneskeen, access to books wasn't exactly
easy. No, it wasn't. He started by writing verses
for the local papers, like the Dundalk Democrat
and the Irish Independent. But they were... Well,
they were pretty amateur. He was learning his
craft. He was. But the lightning bolt hit around
1929 or 1930 when he found a copy of The Irish
Statesman. And for those who don't know the landscape
of Irish literature, The Irish Statesman was
a big deal. Huge. It was edited by George William
Russell, who wrote under the pen name A .E. Russell
was a titan. He was right there with WB8s leading
the Irish literary revival. He was a mystic,
a painter, a poet, and an editor. He was the
gatekeeper. So Kavanaugh sees this magazine and
he thinks, this is it. This is the door. He starts
sending poems to Russell. And at first, Russell
rejects them. Of course. But, and this is to
his eternal credit, he wrote back. He encouraged
Kavanaugh. He told him to keep submitting. And
eventually, Russell published them. And this
leads us to the walk. This is the part of the
story that feels like folklore, but it's real.
It's absolutely real. The sources say in 1931,
Kavanaugh walked to Dublin to meet Russell. I
checked the map. Monaghan to Dublin. That is
80 miles, 129 kilometers. In December. In December.
And he walked. He walked. He couldn't afford
the train fare. So he put on a pair of shoes,
which, remember, as a cobbler, he probably made
or fixed himself. And he just started walking.
That is a level of hunger I can barely comprehend.
I get annoyed if my Uber takes five minutes.
He walked 80 miles just to have a conversation.
It was a pilgrimage. He was walking out of the
fog and towards the light. And it paid off. He
knocked on Russell's door in Dublin. And Russell
let him in. He didn't just open the door. He
opened his library. And this connects back to
what we said earlier about the ivory tower. You'd
expect a guy like Russell, who was obsessed with
fairies and Irish mythology, to tell Cavanaugh
to read old Celtic legends. He would, but he
didn't. What did he give him? No. Russell was
incredibly well -read. He gave Cavanaugh books
by Victor Hugo, Dostoevsky, Walt Whitman, Robert
Browning. He gave him the world. He opened his
mind. And the most important detail in that reading
list, for me, is the first book Cavanaugh borrowed
when he finally joined the Dundalk Library. It
wasn't Eats. No, it was T .S. Eliot's The Wasteland.
Stop and think about that collision of worlds
for a second. It's massive. You have a guy living
in rural 1930s Ireland, a place that is very
traditional, agrarian, almost 19th century in
its rhythm. And he is reading The Wasteland,
which is the ultimate fragmented urban modernist
text. April is the cruelest month. That friction
is the spark that created Patrick Cavanaugh.
He's reading Eliot, and he realizes that poetry
doesn't have to be about pretty sunsets or noble
warriors. Eliot showed him that poetry could
be disjointed. It could be ugly. It could be
about the debris of life. So he looks around
his own life. Exactly. He looked at his own life,
the mud, the manure, the boredom of the potato
field, and he realized, wait. I can write about
this. That leads to his first collection in 1936,
Plowman and Other Poems. Macmillan publishes
it. That's a major publisher. So he's made it,
right? He's the shoemaker poet. Well, he's published,
which is a huge step. Right. But the reception,
it was patronizing. How so? The literary establishment
didn't really know what to do with him. The Times
Literary Supplement called him a poet of promise
rather than achievement. Ouch. The classic pat
on the head. And... The spectator gave him a
real backhanded compliment, saying he wrote better
prose than poetry. They treated him like a curiosity.
Oh, look at the clever peasant who learned to
rhyme. They wanted him to stay in his box. They
wanted the Celtic twilight version of a peasant
simple, happy, grateful. They didn't want the
guy who reads Dostoevsky and hates the fog of
unknowing. Precisely. And Kavanaugh, being Kavanaugh,
didn't handle that pigeonholing well. I can imagine.
He decided to bypass the Dublin scene and try
his luck in London directly. In 1938, he goes
over there, spends about five months, and out
of this period comes a book called The Green
Fool. Now, this book is described as a loosely
autobiographical novel, and I get the sense that
loosely is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
Very heavy lifting. He reinvents himself a bit,
plays up the innocent abroad angle. But the book
is significant for two reasons. One, it was actually
well received internationally. But two, it caused
him a spectacular amount of legal trouble. This
story actually made me laugh out loud. It involves
Oliver St. John Gogarty. Yes, it does. Now, for
listeners who don't know, Gogarty was a massive
figure in Dublin. He was a surgeon, a poet, a
senator, a wit. He was the model for Buck Mulligan
in James Joyce's Ulysses. He was the ultimate
insider. Wealthy, sharp -tongued, part of the
elite. And the green fool... Cavanaugh describes
visiting Gogarty's home. It's a passing anecdote.
What does he say? He writes, I mistook Gogarty's
white road maid for his wife or his mistress.
I expected every poet to have a spare wife. I
expected every poet to have a spare wife. I mean,
come on. That is clearly a joke about the bohemian
reputation of poets. It's a joke. And frankly,
it's a pretty funny one. But Gogarty. Well, Gogarty
did not have a sense of humor about this specific
thing. What did he do? He sued Kavanaugh for
libel. He sued over a joke. He took particular
offense to the coupling of the words wife and
mistress in the same sentence as his name. He
argued it defamed his character. That seems incredibly
sin -skinned for a guy who hung out with James
Joyce. It was a class issue, really. The wealthy
surgeon putting the upstart peasant back in his
place. Did he win? And Googerty won. He was awarded
100 pounds in damages. Which, for a struggling
poet in 1938, must have been a fortune. It was
ruinous. It was a disaster. But what I love is
Kavanaugh's reaction to the book's reception
in general. While he's getting sued, Other people
in Ireland are claiming the book is anti -Catholic.
Which is ironic given how devout his upbringing
was. But did Cavanaugh apologize? Did he retreat?
No. He demanded that the book be displayed prominently
in Dublin bookshop windows. He had this streak
of defiance. If you push him, he pushes back
harder. He wanted the controversy. So he's burnt
bridges with Go -Garty. He's got a reputation
as a wild card. And then 1939 hits. He moves
to Dublin permanently just as the world catches
fire. The emergency. That's what they called
WWII in neutral Ireland. And this period is crucial
for understanding Kavanaugh's psychology. He
arrives in Dublin expecting a salon. He thinks
he's going to find high conversation, brilliant
minds, a community of artists. And instead, what
did he find? He finds what he called dandies,
journalists and civil servants playing at art.
He was incredibly disillusioned. He felt the
Dublin literary scene was fake. He felt they
were posing. He even made a comment that smuggling
on the Monaghan border would have been a better
career choice during the war than writing in
Dublin. Economically, he was probably right.
Smuggling was very profitable. Poetry, not so
much. But his social connections during this
time did lead to one of the weirdest episodes
in his life. The British spy story. I love this.
This involves John Betjeman, who would later
become the poet laureate of the UK. Yes. At the
time, Betjeman was in Dublin as a press attaché
for the British government. But his real job
was British intelligence. He was a spy. Effectively,
yes. His job was to gauge Irish public opinion
and try to influence it toward the Allies. And
he identified Kavanaugh as a potential recruit.
Why Kavanaugh? I mean, he's a loose cannon. He's
getting sued for libel. Why would you want him
as an asset? Because Kavanaugh was an oddity.
He was an outsider on the inside. He moved in
elite circles. He knew the writers and the politicians.
But he was also from the country. He knew the
farmers. He was politically ambiguous. So he
could move between worlds. Benjamin was impressed
by his wide social range. He thought Kavanaugh
could be a conduit to understanding what real
Irish people were thinking. Can you imagine Patrick
Kavanaugh? Double zone seven. It's a hilarious
image. Thankfully, it didn't go anywhere. Kavanaugh
wasn't cut out for espionage. He was too busy
channeling his energy into what critics now consider
his absolute masterpiece. In 1942, he published
The Great Hunger. Now, when I first saw that
title on the outline, I assumed it was about
the historical famine, the potato famine of the
1840s. That is the intentional echo. He wants
you to think of that. But the poem isn't about
history. It's about the spiritual and emotional
famine of the 1940s. Okay. It's a long poem,
over a thousand lines, about a bachelor farmer.
named Patrick McGuire. And this is not the Celtic
Twilight Farmer, is it? God, no. This is the
anti -yeets. There are no happy maidens dancing
at the crossroads. It's about a man who stays
on the farm to look after his aging mother. He
delays marriage. He delays life. And before he
knows it, he's 65, he has no wife, no children,
and his life has just evaporated. It sounds incredibly
bleak. It is bleak. It deals with sexual repression,
loneliness, the crushing repetitive weight of
the seasons. There's a line where he talks about
the apocalypse of clay. The soil isn't nurturing,
it's a tyrant. And this poem was so raw, so honest
about the misery of rural life that it attracted
the attention of the police. It did. The poem
was published in a magazine called Horizon. There
were strong rumors that the Gardaí, the Irish
police, visited the magazine's offices and even
seized copies. Was that true? Cavanaugh later
denied the seizure happened, but he confirmed
the two Gardaí visited his home to investigate.
Because of a poem, that seems wild to us now.
What were they investigating? They were investigating
under the Special Powers Act. The suspicion was
likely obscenity or indecency. You have to remember,
1940s Ireland was deeply conservative and sensorial.
A poem discussing masturbation, sexual frustration,
and the despair of a good Catholic farmer was
seen as a threat to the moral fabric of the nation.
It threatened the self -image of the country.
Exactly. But artistically, it was his peak. He
had finally done it. He had taken the fog of
unknowing and turned it into high art. He gave
a voice to the silent misery of the rural bachelor.
Critics later called it a work of mythic intensity.
So he's written his masterpiece. He's 38 years
old. He's established himself as the real deal.
You'd think, OK, now comes the tenure, the respect,
the easier life. You would think. But Cavanaugh
had a tragic talent for self -sabotage. The next
decade, from 1945 to 1954, is a slow, painful
slide into chaos. We call this section of his
life the nadir. The low point. He's working as
a gossip columnist. That seems beneath him. He
needed the money. He wrote for the Irish press
under the pseudonym Piers Plowman. He was also
a film critic. But his personality was deteriorating.
The sources used the word quixotic, which is
a polite way of saying he was impossible. What
was he doing? He was drinking heavily. He was
becoming disheveled. He had a habit of roaring
at people in pubs and turning on the very friends
who tried to help him. And this culminates in
the second great legal battle of his life. The
Leader libel case in 1954. This feels like the
sequel to the Gogarty trial, but much darker.
Much darker. In 1952, a magazine called The Leader
published an anonymous profile of Kavanaugh,
and it was brutal. It painted him as an alcoholic
sponger who just hung around Dublin bars trying
to be famous. And Kavanaugh, remembering that
he had to pay up when he libeled Gogarty, probably
thought, aha, now I can sue them and get a payout.
Exactly. He thought he'd get an easy settlement.
He thought he could turn the tables. But he miscalculated
badly. How so? The leader didn't fold. They decided
to fight. And they hired a barrister named John
A. Costello. Wait, the John A. Costello? The
former and future Ty Siech Prime Minister of
Ireland. Imagine getting into a legal dispute
and the other side hires the Prime Minister to
cross -examine you. That is a mismatch of epic
proportions. Costello was one of the sharpest
legal minds in the country. Kavanaugh took the
stand. hoping to charm the jury or outwit the
lawyer. But Costello absolutely destroyed him.
Really? He went through Kavanaugh's own writings,
his own behavior. He painted Kavanaugh as a hypocrite
who dished out abuse but couldn't take it. He
tore his credibility to shreds. So he loses the
case? He loses. And it wasn't just a financial
loss. It was a public humiliation. He was exposed.
There's even this bizarre little twist to it.
What's that? Years later. Costello and Kavanaugh
actually became good friends. Kavanaugh even
voted for him. Well, that's a very Kavanaugh
thing to do. It really is. But the story gets
worse. And then, as if the universe were writing
a tragedy, immediately after the trial, he gets
sick. Immediately. Yeah. He was diagnosed with
lung cancer. Wow. Talk about kicking a man when
he's down. He was admitted to the hospital and
had a lung removed. So let's take stock. It's
1954. Kavanaugh is 50 years old. He has lost
his reputation in a humiliating trial. He is
broke. He has just lost a lung. He is lying in
a hospital bed. By all conventional logic, this
is the end of the story. This is where he fades
away. It feels like the end. But this is actually
where the story pivots. This is where we get
the canal bank rebirth. Okay, let's unpack this.
Because this is the moment where Kavanaugh seems
to find peace. And it leads to his most important
philosophical idea. While he was recovering from
the surgery, he was weak. He couldn't drink.
He couldn't shout. He spent the hot summer of
1955 just sitting on the banks of the Grand Canal
in Dublin. Just sitting. Doing nothing. Doing
nothing. And in that stillness, stripped of his
ambitions, stripped of his arrogance, he found
a new way of seeing the world. He wrote a poem
about it. Lines written on a seat on the Grand
Canal, Dublin. This is one of his most famous
poems. It is. The opening lines are iconic. Oh,
commemorate me where there is water, canal water,
preferably. So stilly greeny at the heart of
summer. Canal water, preferably. I love that
modification. Not a mighty ocean, not a rushing
river, just a man -made ditch in the middle of
the city. It's the celebration of the ordinary.
And this is where his philosophy of the parochial
versus the provincial crystallizes. We tease
this in the intro, but we need to really explain
it because it's his legacy. Right, because to
modern ears, parochial sounds bad. It sounds
small. And provincial sounds, well, maybe a bit
similar. Kavanaugh flipped the definitions. For
him, provincial was the negative term. Okay,
so what did provincial mean to him? To be provincial
meant you're constantly looking over your shoulder
at the metropolis. You're in Dublin, but you're
looking at London. You're in New York, but you're
checking what Paris is doing. You don't trust
your own experience. You think real life is happening
somewhere else. So you try to copy it to be sophisticated.
So the Dublin literary types he hated, the dandies,
they were provincial because they were just imitating
what was cool in London. Exactly. They were insecure.
But to be parochial in Kavanaugh's view. was
to have total trust in the local. It meant understanding
that the life you live right where you are contains
all the drama and truth of the universe. He had
a quote about this, right? All great civilizations
are based on the parish. Yes. He believed that
if you went deep enough into your own small corner
of the world, your own parish, you would find
the universal. You didn't need to go to London
or Rome to find art. Art was in the soil of Inniskien.
Art was in the green water of the Grand Canal.
That is a really empowering idea. It's basically
saying stop looking at Instagram to see what
life should look like. Look at the bench you're
sitting on. Exactly. And you see the influence
of this everywhere. Seamus Heaney, the Nobel
Prize winner who came after Kavanaugh, said that
this distinction, the parochial versus the provincial
liberated Irish poets. How so? It gave them permission
to write about their own lives without feeling
inferior. Kavanaugh told them, your life matters.
Your mud matters. So Kavanaugh is recovering.
He has this new philosophy. Does his career recover?
It does. It wasn't instant. In 1956, he had a
setback when Macmillan rejected his new poems.
He was depressed again. Of course. But a man
named Patrick Swift intervened. Swift was an
artist, a writer, and he arranged for the poems
to be published in a magazine called Nimbus.
And this was the turning point. It was. This
collection included the canal poems, and suddenly
the critics woke up. They realized he wasn't
just the peasant poet or the alcoholic sponger.
He was a master. He was writing with a clarity
and a grace that he never had before. And around
this time, we have to talk about On Raglan Road.
It's probably his most famous work to the general
public because of the song. It's a beautiful
story of unrequited love. The poem was originally
titled Dark -Haired Miriam Ran Away, published
way back in 1946. So before the cancer, before
the rebirth. Way before. It's about a woman named
Hilda Moriarty. Kavanaugh was infatuated with
her. She was a medical student, much younger,
beautiful. And he knew it was doomed. Oh, he
did. The poem begins. On Raglan Road, on an autumn
day, I met her first and knew that her dark hair
would weave a snare that I might one day rue.
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted
way. It's heartbreaking. He walks into the trap
willingly. Years later, Cavanaugh was in a pub
in Dublin, the Bailey, and he met Luke Kelly.
Of the Dubliners. A legend. The legendary folk
singer. Cavanaugh told Luke Kelly that he should
sing this poem. He suggested setting it to the
traditional air, Thane, Giel, and Leigh, the
dawning of the day. And the rest is history.
Luke Kelly's version is definitive. You can hear
the gravel in his voice that matches the gravel
in Kavanaugh's life. But it's been covered by
everyone. Van Morrison, Sinéad O 'Connor. Mark
Knopfler, Ed Sheeran. It's entered the DNA of
Irish culture. It really has. So he has this
late success. He's finding his footing again.
And he even finds love. He does. He married Catherine
Barry Maloney in April 1967. She was a significant
figure herself. the niece of Kevin Barry, the
famous Irish Republican martyr. They set up a
home on Waterloo Road in Dublin. It seemed like
he was finally going to have some stability.
But sadly, the clock had run out. It had. Later
that same year, in 1967, there was a premiere
of a play adaptation of his novel, Terry Flynn.
It was at the town hall in Dundalk, near his
home. So, a homecoming of sorts. A real celebration.
Kavanaugh attended, he was a guest of honor,
but he fell ill right there at the premiere.
That feels almost too scripted. Dying right as
his work is being celebrated on stage in his
home county? It's poetic, in a dark way. He died
a few days later, on November 30, 1967. He was
buried back in Enniskeen. So that's the life.
From the shoemaker's bench to the canal bench.
But the afterlife of Patrick Cavanaugh is just
as interesting. We mentioned Seamus Heaney earlier.
Heaney is the key witness here. He credited Cavanaugh
with having a transformative effect on Irish
culture. He said Cavanaugh liberated the gifts
of the poets who came after him. What did he
mean by that? Before Cavanaugh, you felt you
had to write like Gatesmithic, grand, distant.
Cavanaugh made it okay to just be Irish, to be
ordinary, to write about your own parish. But
his legacy pops up in the weirdest places. We
have to go back to the Russell Crowe story. We
teased it. Now give us the details. Okay, so
it's 2002. The BAFTAs, the British Academy Film
Awards. Russell Crowe wins Best Actor for A Beautiful
Mind. I remember this. He gets up on stage in
his tuxedo and he decides to quote a four -line
poem by Patrick Cavanaugh called Sanctity. Do
you have the quote? To be a poet and not know
the trade. to be a lover and repel all women.
Twin ironies by which great saints are made,
the agonizing pincer jaws of heaven. It's a profound
quote. It's about how suffering and failure make
you a saint. But the BBC, who was broadcasting
the show, cut that part of the speech out. Why?
To save time. Yeah, to save time for the news
or something. And Crow didn't appreciate the
edit. To put it mildly, he reportedly confronted
the producer, Malcolm Gary, at a dinner afterwards.
Allegedly, he shoved them against a wall and
used some very colorful language, shouting about
how dare they cut the poetry. It's so Kavanaugh,
isn't it? A brawl over a poem. Kavanaugh would
have absolutely loved it. The idea of a Hollywood
gladiator fighting a TV executive in defense
of his four lines of verse. It's the perfect
tribute. And speaking of weird tributes, tell
me about the Disney World connection, because
I genuinely thought you were joking when I read
this in the notes. I am not joking. If you go
to Disney Springs, formerly Downtown Disney,
In Orlando, Florida, there is a massive Irish
pub called Raglan Road. Okay, that makes sense.
And right outside that pub, there's a bronze
statue of Patrick Cavanaugh sitting on a bench.
No way. Yes way. Tourists in Mickey Mouse ears
sit next to him and take selfies. The man who
hated the provincial impulse to copy others,
the man who wrote about the grim reality of potato
farming and the crushing poverty of the fog of
unknowing, commercial, sanitized, artificial
place on Earth. It is the ultimate irony. But
then again, remember his request? Right. He wanted
to be commemorated where there is water. Florida
has plenty of water. Maybe he'd appreciate the
absurdity of it. True. And back in Dublin, there
is the real seat on the Grand Canal. Yes. It's
a place of pilgrimage now. Every St. Patrick's
Day, people gather there. They read his poems.
They have a drink. It's exactly what he asked
for. Brother, commemorate me thus beautifully.
And we do. It's a beautiful legacy. So as we
wrap this up. What does this all mean for us?
Why does a shoemaker from 1930s Monaghan matter
to someone listening to a podcast in 2026? I
think Kavanaugh matters because he validated
the ordinary life. He took the fog of unknowing
and showed us how to clear it. He showed us that
you don't need to look for myths or fairies or
go to London or New York to find magic. The magic
is in the street, in the canal, in the potato
field. He grounded us. He brought literature
down from the Misty Mountains and put it in the
mud where we actually live. And in doing so...
He made it real. He made it universal. I want
to leave the listener with a thought today. We
live in a world that is obsessed with being global.
We're connected to everyone, everywhere, all
the time. We're constantly scrolling, looking
at what's happening on the other side of the
world, feeling like that is where real life is.
In Kavanaugh's terms, we are very provincial.
We are constantly looking outward, insecure that
we are missing out. Exactly. So here's the question.
In this age of hyper -connectivity, is Kavanaugh's
idea of the parochial, knowing your own small
corner deeply, truly understanding your own immediate
reality, is that actually the only way to be
unique? Is looking inward at your own parish
the only way to really say something to the world?
A man innocently dabbles in words and rhymes.
and finds that it is his life. Thanks for diving
deep with us today. Thank you. We'll see you
next time.