Brendan Kennelly

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Brendan Kennelly (born 1936) is a popular Irish poet and novelist. He is Professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College Dublin. He was born in Ballylongford, Co Kerry and was educated at the inter-denominational St. Ita's College, Tarbert, Co. Kerry, and at Trinity College. Kennelly graduated from Trinity and wrote his PhD thesis there. He also studied at Leeds University. He took up a post as lecturer in English Literature at Trinity in 1963 and became the first professor of Modern Literature in 1973. He has also taught at the University of Antwerp and in the United States. He won the AE Memorial Prize for Poetry and the Critics Special Harvey's Award.

Although he is better known as a poet than a literary critic, he was commissioned by Penguin to edit the influential “Penguin Book of Irish Verse.” His prose has also been edited by Ake Persson in “Journey into Joy: Selected Prose,” published in 1994.

Kennelly’s poetry can be scabrous, down-to-earth and colloquial. He avoids intellectual pretension and literary posturing, and his attitude to poetic language could be summed up in the title of one of his epic poems, “Poetry my Arse”. Another long (400 page) epic poem, “The Book of Judas”, published in 1991, topped the Irish bestseller list.

He is a prolific and fluent writer, with more than twenty books of poems to his credit, including My Dark Fathers (1964), Collection One: Getting Up Early (1966), Good Souls to Survive (1967), Dream of a Black Fox (1968), Love Cry (1972), The Voices (1973), Shelley in Dublin (1974), A Kind of Trust (1975), Islandman (1977), A Small Light (1979) and The House That Jack Didn’t Build (1982).

Kennelly is no stranger to literary controversy, particularly in works such as “Cromwell”, about the English Roundhead and Puritan whose army sacked the small Irish city of Drogheda and slaughtered its Royalist garrison and townspeople in 1649.

Kennelly has edited several other anthologies, including “Between Innocence and Peace: Favourite Poems of Ireland” (1993), “Ireland’s Women: Writings Past and Present, with Katie Donovan and A. Norman Jeffares” (1994), and “Dublines,” with Katie Donovan (995).

He is also the author of two novels, “The Crooked Cross” (1963) and “The Florentines” (1967), and three plays in a Greek Trilogy, “Antigone,” “Medea” and “The Trojan Women.”

Kennelly is an Irish language (Gaelic) speaker, and has translated Irish poems in “A Drinking Cup” (1970) and “Mary” (Dublin 1987). A selection of his collected translations was published as “Love of Ireland: Poems from the Irish” (1989).

Kennelly is a much-loved poet in Ireland, but his overall place in the Irish poetic canon may be somewhat controversial, Some consider “Cromwell” to be a major work, one of the most important Irish poems of the twentieth century. Others may prefer to think of him, despite his academic standing, as anti-intellectual, or lacking in complexity in a period when modernist poetry, from TS Eliot and the later William Butler Yeats, tended to be esoteric and difficult.

Language is important in Kennelly’s work – in particular the vernacular of the small and isolated communities in North Kerry where he grew up, and of the Dublin streets and pubs where he became both roamer and raconteur for many years. Kennelly’s language is also grounded in the Irish-language poetic tradition, oral and written, which can be both satirical and salacious in its approach to human follies.

Kennelly has commented on his own use of language: “Poetry is an attempt to cut through the effects of deadening familiarity and repeated, mechanical usage in order to unleash that profound vitality, to reveal that inner sparkle. In the beginning was the Word. In the end will be the Word…language is a human miracle always in danger of drowning in a sea of familiarity.”

An official biography: “Brendan Kennelly, A Host of Ghosts,” by John McDonagh, was published in 2004.

At the state funeral of Charles Haughey on 15th June 2006 he gave an oration about his love of poetry and his friendship with the former Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister).