From Patrick Kavanagh

Patrick Kavanagh

I am always shy of calling myself a poet and I wonder much at those
young men and sometimes old men who boldly declare their poeticality.
If you ask them what they are, they say: Poet.

There is, of course, a poetic movement which sees poetry
materialistically. The writers of this school see no transcendent
nature in the poet; they are practical chaps, excellent technicians.
But somehow or other I have a belief in poetry as a mystical thing,
and a dangerous thing.

A man (I am thinking of myself) innocently dabbles in words and rhymes
and finds that it is his life. Versing activity leads him away from
the paths of conventional happiness. For reasons that I have never
been able to explain, the making of verses has changed the course of
one man's destiny. I could have been as happily unhappy as the
ordinary countryman in Ireland. I might have stayed at the same moral
age all my life. Instead of that, poetry made me a sort of outcast.
And I was abnormally normal.

                --Patrick Kavanagh
                   Author's Note, page xiii
                   Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems
                   Martin Brian & O'Keeffe, London, 1972