An Epic Sonnet?

 Browsing in the Sonnets section of the Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, I was amused to find a sonnet bearing the surprising title 'Epic'. It was written by the Irish poet and novelist Patrick Kavanagh, recalling the time of the Munich Crisis of 1938, and I think it's rather good, so I pass it on – 

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul!"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel –
"Here is the march along these iron stones."
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

It's an unusual sonnet, both in what it describes and in its loose, barely half-rhymed form – though there is a definite division between the first octave and the closing sestet. 
The world of Duffys and McCabes and pitchfork-armed clans was the one in which Kavanagh grew up in rural County Monaghan. The son of a cobbler and farmer, Patrick left school at 13 to work on the land and as a shoemaker's apprentice. He started to write poems in his twenties, and was noticed by George William Russell (known as 'AE', a leader of the Irish literary revival), who took him under his wing. Kavanagh soon began building a successful writing career, though it was not without setbacks, including being sued for libel by Oliver St John Gogarty. He settled in Dublin when war broke out in 1939, where (according to his biographer), 'he realised that the stimulating environment he had imagined was little different from the petty and ignorant world he had left'. However, he caught the eye of John Betjeman, who was in Dublin, officially as a press attaché, less officially as an agent for British intelligence (in which capacity he was briefly an IRA assassination target – until their head of civilian intelligence read Betjeman's collection Continual Dew and decided to spare him). Despite their very different backgrounds and styles, the two men seem to have got on well and admired each other's works. Kavanagh even wrote a poem, 'Candida', to celebrate the first birthday of Betjeman's daughter –

Candida is one to-day,
What is there that one can say?
One is where the race begins
Or the sum that counts our sins;
But the mark time makes to-morrow
Shapes the cross of joy or sorrow.

Candida is one to-day,
What is there for me to say?
On the day that she was one
There were apples in the sun
And the fields long wet with rain
Crumply in dry winds again.

Candida is one and I
Wish her lots and lots of joy.
She the nursling of September
Like a war she won't remember.
Candida is one to-day 
And there's nothing more to say.