in 1939 kavanagh settled in dublin. in his biography john nemo describes kavanagh's encounter with the city's literary world: "he realized that the stimulating environment he had imagined was little different from the petty and ignorant world he had left. he soon saw through the literary masks many dublin writers wore to affect an air of artistic sophistication. to him such men were dandies, journalists, and civil servants playing at art. his disgust was deepened by the fact that he was treated as the literate peasant he had been rather than as the highly talented poet he believed he was in the process of becoming". in 1942 he published his long poem "the great hunger", which describes the privations and hardship of the rural life he knew well. although it was rumoured at the time that all copies of "horizon", the literary magazine in which it was published, were seized by the garda síochána, kavanagh denied that this had occurred, saying later that he was visited by two gardaí at his home (probably in connection with an investigation of "horizon" under the special powers act). written from the viewpoint of a single peasant against the historical background of famine and emotional despair, the poem is often held by critics to be kavanagh's finest work. it set out to counter the saccharine romanticising of the irish literary establishment in its view of peasant life. richard murphy in "the new york times book review" described it as "a great work" and robin skelton in "poetry" praised it as "a vision of mythic intensity".