Stony Grey Soil Comments

Not to knock Yeats but yes he did live at Thoor Ballylee in the summertime but essentially he had an urban outlook. Kavanagh was rural through and through.

Kavanagh truly is the greatest of all Irish poets. Unlike Yeats, who romanticised the Irish peasantry to almost ridiculously patronising heights; Kavanagh, (himself a poor Irish farmer) , saw this way of life for what it really was; an unfulfilled life of struggle, poverty and frustration. His poem “Stony Grey Soil” perfectly exemplifies this way of life and gives the reader a pragmatic insight into the real life experiences of the Irish peasantry, rather than Yeats’s sentimentalised thesis, viewed from his comfortable upper-class ivory tower.