Patrick Kavanagh’s walk to Dublin to meet AE, or George William Russell, in December 1931 is occasionally mentioned in Kavanagh criticism. The journey on foot is usually regarded as Kavanagh’s gesture to enhance his peasant quality to impress city-dwelling literati. However, the narrator of The Green Fool, Kavanagh’s fictionalized autobiography published in 1938 that features the long walk, explains otherwise: the main purpose of the travel is to go on the road, rather than to visit AE in Dublin, and to be a tramp, not a peasant. This paper re-examines the meaning of this on-foot journey, and other walks, in The Green Fool, and also finds connection between these walks and the poetics of Kavanagh. By doing so, the paper aims to offer a new way of reading this relatively unexplored text, and to shed new light to Kavanagh’s idea of poetry. Scrutiny of the text finds recurrent figures of itinerant workers and vagrants often called ‘journeymen’, ‘tramps’, and ‘beggars’. To the eye of the narrator, their oral culture, their knowledge of the world, and their craftsmanship that even includes their shrewd ways of business, are idealized. Their way of life is romanticized as that of wandering poets. The narrator’s travel to Dublin in the winter of 1931 described in Chapter 29 of The Green Fool, ‘A Visit to Dublin’, and the journey to the west for about two months in the following spring related in Chapter 30,‘Tramping’, are experiments of fashioning himself into one of those wandering poets. The experiments turn out to be a failure in the sense that he finds his trampings far from poetic. The dominant tone of the narration in ‘A Visit to Dublin’ is close to that of a slapstick comedy, and the one in ‘Tramping’, a drab disillusion. The experiments fail to become poems, too. On the other hand, however, it is a success in the sense that he freshly recognizes the value of the wanderings at home, on the country roads and in the fields of Inniskeen, which generate poetic moments. In the light of this reading of The Green Fool, some of his early poems, included in his first collection of poems, Ploughman and Other Poems, published in 1936, take on new meanings. ‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’ in particular can be read as an example of crystallization of poetics of lone walking.

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