Patrick Kavanagh was born in County Monaghan on October 21, 1904. The son of a farmer and cobbler, he grew up surrounded by those "stony-grey hills" where so much of his poetry has its inspiration. He left school apparently destined to become a small farmer, but "I dabbled in verse", he said, "and it became my life." At the age of thirty he left Inniskeen to walk fifty miles to Dublin and in 1936 his first book of verse, Ploughman and Other Poems, was published. He was the first great poet of this century to write with honesty and understanding about rural Ireland. His efforts reaped small rewards during his lifetime in terms of finance, but today the influence of his laughing, lyrical, and courageous poetry and prose is inestimable. Patrick Kavanagh died in 1967 and is buried in his native Inniskeen.