Before writing 'The Great Hunger,' Patrick Kavanagh published his autobiographical prose memoir 'The Green Fool' (1938) which described in frank detail the realities of subsistence farming in County Monaghan in the 1920s and 1930s, including the parasites that afflicted both humans and livestock. Kavanagh's unsentimental vision of Irish rural life, shaped by his own experience as a small farmer before he escaped to Dublin, refused the pastoral idealisations of the Irish literary revival and insisted on representing the bodily reality of a life lived close to animals, vermin, and the land.

Kavanagh's refusal to idealise rural Irish life — his insistence on including the worms, lice, and agricultural parasites that were part of the farmer's reality — was a decisive intervention in the Irish literary tradition, which had tended to romanticise the peasantry. His example was central to the development of Seamus Heaney's early poetry, which also refused such romanticisation and insisted on the bodily and natural specificity of rural Ulster life. Both poets stand in the Burns tradition of taking the rural parasite seriously as a poetic subject.