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Lee, Myeongha. “The Restoration and Reconciliation in the Poetry of Patrick Kavanagh.” Studies in English Language & Literature. 42.3 (2016): 81-103. Patrick Kavanagh stands as a transitional figure bridging the gap between the Irish literary revivalists led by W. B. Yeats and the new generation of post-Yeatsian poets. Kavanagh's greatest literary achievement lies in his ability to demythologize the revivalist posture by being the first poet to deal very realistically with Irish rural life through the lens of an insider. In his poetic masterpiece, The Great Hunger, Kavanagh bitterly mocks the revivalists' idealizations of the local peasantry by showing the grimmer and more tragic reality of a 65-year-old farmer named Patrick Maguire. However, his poems written in the late 1960s demonstrate how his later poetic world stays away from the social discontent apparent in the middle period and instead moves toward personal satisfaction based on his poetic concepts of parochialism and comic spirit. Among his later poems, "In Memory of My Mother" serves as a good example to prove this shift by presenting many similarities with and differences from The Great Hunger. The differences between the two similar yet different poems written in different times can be interpreted in terms of ‘restoration’ and ‘reconciliation.’ In this sense, by comparing and contrasting the two poems, this paper aims to take a closer look at how Kavanagh’s poetic landscape is fully completed through a series of restoration and reconciliation steps: “the harmony between ego and reality,” “the expansion of spaces and interaction,” and “the restoration of ordinariness.” (Chonnam National University)