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Life
1936- ; b. 17 April, Ballylongford, Co. Kerry; ed. St. Ita’s College, Tarbert; played [Gaelic] football successfully for his parish and county as a minor, junior and senior; proceeded to TCD on long-standing scholarship founded by Anglo-Irish landlord of N. Kerry, aetat. 17 [1949]; grad. in English & French (Double 1st); worked for a time as a bus-conductor in London; proceeded to Leeds Univ., where he completed a PhD on “Modern Irish Poets and the Irish Epic” (1966), initially working under Derry Jeffares, 1962-63; issued four pamphlet-books with Rudi Holzapfel; My Dark Fathers (1964); winner of “AE” Russell Award for Poetry, 1967; issued Selected Poems (1969); also The Crooked Cross (1963) and The Florentines (1967), novels; |
delivered oration at grave of Frank O’Connor, 1966, later characterising him as ‘Ireland’s Ezra Pound’ in his preface to The Penguin Book of Irish Verse (1970); read with Austin Clarke and Eavan Boland at the dedication of the Yeats Memorial, St. Stephen’s Green, 26 Oct. 1967; appt. visiting professor at Bernard Coll., NY, and Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, where he interviewed W. H. Auden, 15 Nov. 1971; m. Peggy O’Brien, whom he met as a visiting lecturer there, and returned with her to Ireland, with whom a dg.; later divorced; appt. to TCD Chair of Modern English, 1973; worked on Mountjoy Prison teaching programme; |
his version of Antigone (Peacock Th., 1986), both a ‘feminist declaration’ and a ‘straight translation’ distilled from previous English versions and written in 1984, and which entered the Leaving Cert. syllabus in the 1990s; issued Cromwell (1983), a series of 160 poems on obsessive themes of Irish history with its Irish protagonist Buffún; Medea (RDS April 1988), inspired by womens’ stories overheard in a Dublin hospital in 1986; winner of
Critics Special Harvey's Award, 1988; issued new selection including early poetry as A Time for Voices (1990); coined the term ‘Protholic Cathestant’ at Kavanagh’s Yearly, Monaghan, 1990; |
issued The Book of Judas (1991), as a sequel to Cromwell, continuing the same subversive strategy; wrote a play, The Trojan Women (Peacock 1993), directed at the Peacock Theatre by Lynne Parker with Pauline McLynn as Andromache, representing both the power of women and the male fear of that power; issued Poetry My Arse (1995), revolves around poet-persona called Ace de Homer and his partner Mary Jane of somewhat Yeatsian extraction; Blood Wedding (1996), after Frederico García Lorca’s Bodas de Sangre [1933], a verse play performed in England, Autumn 1996; winner of
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
, 1996; |
advertised Toyota cars and financial services on television; successfully underwent triple by-pass surgery at the hands of Mr Nelligan, Oct. 1996; The Man Made of Rain (1998) is a longer poem, based on a vision experienced at the time; Äke Persson (Göteburg Univ.) hold tapes of his poetry readings, 1989-1996; winner of 1999 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, 1999; a Brendan Kennelly Summer School was held inaugurally in Ballylongford on 9-12 Aug. 2001; awarded the Wild Geese Trophy of the Ireland Fund of France, 2003; retired from TCD, Summer 2005; |
ssued Reservoir Voices (28 May 2009), following semester-long visiting professorship at Boston College, Fall 2007 - a period characterised by loneliness and depression; received 2010 PEN Award for his contribution to Irish literature, 29 Jan., being presented by David Norris; The Essential Brendan Kennelly was edited by Terence Brown and Michael Longley for his 75th birthday (2011). DIL OCIL |
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Works| Poetry Collections |
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| Criticism |
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Num. others rep. in Åke Persson, ed., Journey into Joy: Selected Prose (Newcastle: Bloodaxe 1994) [see contents]. |
| Num. reviews incl. contemporary notices on Seamus Heaney, Eleven Poems, and Michael Longley, Ten Poems [both QUB Festive Publ.] |
| Edited collections |
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| Miscellaneous |
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| Note, occasional contribs. incl. “Two”, a poem i.m. David Webb (TCD Fellow) , in Beyond Babel: A Journal of Undergraduate Academic Writing, ed. Niamh Tallon & Leigh Hamilton (TCD 1998 ), p.[2; as infra]. |
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Bibliographical details| Authors included: |
Frank O'Connor - Charles Wolfe - Jeremiah Joseph Callanan - George Darley -- Eugene O'Curry - James Clarence Mangan - Gerald Griffin - Francis Sylvester Mahony - Edward Walsh - George Fox - Samuel Ferguson - Aubrey de Vere - Thomas Davis - William McBurney - Arthur G. Geoghegan - Lady Wilde - John Kells Ingram - Michael Joseph McCann - Thomas Caulfield Irwin - William Allingham - Thomas D'Arcy McGee - John Todhunter - Edward Dowden - John Boyle O'Reilly - Arthur O'Shaughnessy - Emily Lawless - Alfred Perceval Graves - William Larminie - John Keegan Casey - Fanny Parnell - Oscar Wilde - T. W. Rolleston - John Synge - Thomas MacDonagh - Patrick Pearse - Joseph Plunkett - Francis Ledwidge - W.B. Yeats - George William Russell - Oliver St. John Gogarty - Joseph Campbell - Seamus O'Sullivan - Padraic Colum - James Joyce - James Stephens - Austin Clarke - Monk Gibbon - F.R. Higgins - R. N. D. Wilson - Patrick MacDonogh - Ewart Milne - C. Day Lewis - Padraic Fallon - Bryan Guinness - Patrick Kavanagh - Samuel Beckett - John Hewitt - Louis MacNeice - Denis Devlin - Robert Farren - W. R. Rodgers - W. B. Stanford - Donagh MacDonagh - Sigerson Clifford - Valentin Iremonger - Kevin Faller - Roy McFadden - Padraic Fiacc - Anthony Cronin - Jerome Kiely - Eugene R. Watters - Pearse Hutchinson - Richard Kell - Richard Murphy - John B. Keane - Ulick O'Connor - Basil Payne - Thomas Kinsella - John Montague - Patrick Galvin - Seán Lucy - Richard Weber - Sean O'Meara - James Simmons - James Liddy - Rivers Carew - James McAuley - Desmond O'Grady - Brendan Kennelly - Rudi Holzapfel - Seamus Heaney - Michael Longley - Seamus Deane - Timothy Brownlow - Michael Hartnett - Derek Mahon - Eilean Ni Chuilleanain - John F. Deane - John Ennis - Paul Durcan - Eavan Boland - Hayden Murphy - Tom McGurk - Richard Ryan - Hugh Maxton - Frank Ormsby - Peter Fallon - Paul Muldoon - Thomas McCarthy - Aidan Carl Mathews.
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—Retrieved from Wikipedia page on Penguin Poetry Anthologies - online; accessed 10.05.2011. |
| Contents |
Introduction; biographical notices. PART I - translated from Irish [Gaelic]: several anonymous poems trans. by Kuno Meyer; Kennelly and Frank O’Connor [22 pieces incl. The Viking Terror, Blackbird by Belfast Lough, Oisin, Caoilte, Old Woman of Beare], and James Carney; Eagan O’Rahilly [4 incl. Brightness of Brightness]; Eileen O’Leary; Anthony Raftery; Bryan Merriman. PART II - Anglo-Irish, Jonathan Swift; Oliver Goldsmith; John Philpot Curran; William Drennan; Richard Alfred Milliken; Thomas Moore; Sir Aubrey de Vere; Charles Wolfe; Jeremiah Joseph Callanan; George Darley; Eugene O’Curry [Do You Remember That Night]; James Clarence Mangan [Dark Rosaleen, O’Hussey’s Ode to the Maguire, Woman of Three Cows, Gone in the Wind, And Then No More, Lover’s Farewell, Vision of Connaught in the Thirteenth Century, The Nameless One, Siberia, Lament for the Princes of Tir-Owen and Tirconnell, Shapes and Signs, Kinkora, To Joseph Brenan, The One Mystery, To the Ingleezee Khafir, calling himself Djaun Bool Djnkinzun, time of the Barmecides, Twenty Golden years Ago]; anon., The Night that Larry was Stretched; Gerald Griffin [Aileen Aroon]; Francis Sylvester Mahoney; Edward Walsh [only Dawning of the Day]; George Fox; Samuel Ferguson [Burial of King Cormac, Cashel of Munster, Cean Dubh Deelish, Fair Hills of Ireland, Fairy Thorn, Deirdre’s Lament of the Sons of Uisnech, Lark in the Clear Air, Lament for the Death of Thomas Davis, Vengeance of the Welshmen of Tirawley]; aubrey de Vere; Thomas Davis [only Lament for the Death of Eaoghan ruadh O’Neill]; William McBurney [The Croppy Boy]; Arthur G. Geoghegan [After Aughrim]; Lady Wilde [The Famine Years]; John Kells Ingram [Memory of the Dead]; Michael Joseph McCann [O’Donnell Abu]; Thomas Caulfield Irwin [four sonnets]; William Allingham; Thomas D’Arcy McGee [The Celts]; John Todhunter; Edward Dowden; John Boyle O’Reilly; Arthur O’Shaugnessy; Emily Lawless; Alfred Percival Graves; William Larminie; John Keegan Casey; Fanny Parnell; Oscar Wilde; T. W. Rolleston; John Synge; Thomas MacDonagh; Patrick Pearse [I am Ireland, Renunciation, The Mother, The Fool, The Rebel, Christmas 1915]; Joseph Plunkett; Francis Ledwidge [Wife of Lew, June, The Coming Poet, Thomas MacDonagh, The Blackbirds, Ireland]. PART III - Yeats and After: W. B. Yeats [only To Ireland in the Coming tims, Sept. 1913, The Statues]; George Russell [only On Behalf of Some Irishmen Not followers of Tradition]; Oliver St John Gogarty; Seamus O’Sullivan; Padraic Colum; James Joyce [Gas from a Burner]; James Stephens [A Glass of Beer]; Austin Clarke; Monk Gibbon; F. R. Higgins [Father and son];; R. N. D. Wilson [Enemies]; Patrick MacDonogh [The Widow of Drynam]; Ewart Milne [Ballad of An Orphan]; C. Day Lewis [remembering Con Markievicz; Padraic Fallon [Field Observation]; Bryan Guinness; Patrick Kavanagh; Samuel Beckett [Poem]; John Hewitt [The Glens]; Louis MacNeice [Valediction]; Denis Devlin [The Colours of Love]; Robert Farren [The Mason]; W. R. Rodgers [The Net, Home Thoughts from Abroad]; W. B. Stanford; Donagh MacDonagh; Sigerson Clifford [Ballad of the Tinker’s Wife]; Valentine Iremonger [Icarus]; Kevin Faller; Roy McFadden; Padraic Fiacc; Anthony Cronin [For a Father]; Jerome Kiely [Lizard]; Eugene R. Watters [from Weekend of Dermot and Grace]; Pearse Hutchinson [Look, No Hands];Richard Kell; Richard Murphy [The Poet of the Island]; John B. Keane; Ulick O’Connor [Oscar Wilde]; Basil Payne; Thomas Kinsella [Downstream II]; John Montague; Sean Lucy; Richard Weber; James Simmons [Art and Reality]; James Liddy [In Memory of Bernard Berenson; Rivers Carew [Catching Trout]; James McAuley [Stella]; Desmond O’Grady [Homecoming]; Kennelly [My Dark Fathers]; Rudi Holzapfel [The Employee]; Seamus Heaney [At a Potato Digging]; Timothy Brownlow [Leaving Inishmore; Michael Hartnett [Mo Grá Thu]; Derek Mahon [In Carrowdore Churchyard]; Eilean ni Chuilleanáin; Eaven Boland [New Territory]; Tom McGurk [Big Ned]. Acknowledgements and index of titles and first lines. |
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Landmarks of Irish Drama, introduced by Brendan Kennelly (London: Methuen 1988), CONTENTS: G. B. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island; Synge, Playboy; W. B. Yeats, On Baile’s Strand; Seán O’Casey, The Silver Tassie; Denis Johnston, The Old Lady Says “No!”; Samuel Beckett, All That Fall; Brendan Behan, The Quare Fellow [appendix includes 1 page of Gaelic version]; Introduction, vii-xliv. Bibliography incls. such titles as Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre (1973 edn.); O’Casey, Autobiography (espec. Inisfallen, 1940); Nicholas Grene, Shaw: A Critical View (1984); Peter Ure, Yeats the Playwright (1963); Grene, Synge: A Critical Study of the Plays (1975); James Simmons, Sean O’Casey (1983); Joseph Ronsley, [ed.,] Denis Johnston, A Retrospective (1981).
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Åke Persson, ed., Journey into Joy: Selected Prose (Newcastle: Bloodaxe 1994), 271pp.; CONTENTS: Kennelly, Preface [9]; Persson, Introduction [11]; Poetry and Violence [23]; A View of Irish Poetry, 1. Irish Poetry to Yeats [46; see extract]; 2. Irish Poetry Since Yeats [55; see extract]; A View of Irish Drama [72]; The Poetry of Joseph Plunkett [103]; Patrick Kavanagh’s Comic Vision [109; see under Kavanagh, as supra]; Derek Mahon’s Humane Perspective [127; see under Mahon, as infra]; Louis MacNeice: An Irish Outsider [136]; George Moore’s Lonely Voices: A Study of his Short Stories [145]; The Heroic Ideal in Yeats’s Cuchulain Plays [162]; Austin Clarke and the Epic Poem [170]; Satire in Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth [182; see under O’Brien, as infra]; The Little Monasteries: Frank O’Connor as a Poet [198]; Seán O’Casey’s Journey into Joyce [209]; James Joyce’s Humanism [217]; W. B. Yeats: An Experiment in Living [231]. Editor’s Note, 248; Notes, 249; Acknowledgements, 265; Index, 266.
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‘Patrick Kavanagh’, in Ariel (July 1970), pp.7-28 [available at Ariel Archive online - accessed 21.05.2011]; rep. in Irish Poetry in English, ed. Seán Lucy [The Thomas Davis Lectures on Anglo-Irish Poetry] (Cork & Dublin: Mercier Press 1973), pp.159-84 [Chap. XI; see under Patrick Kavanagh, supra]; rep. as ‘Patrick Kavanagh’s Comic Vision’, in Åke Persson, ed., Journey into Joy: Selected Prose (Newcastle: Bloodaxe 1994), pp.109-26. [See also full-text version in RICORSO Library, “Critical Classics”, via index or direct.]
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Criticism| Monographs & Collections |
| Articles & Reviews |
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See also Marianne McDonald, & J. Michael Walton, eds., Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy, intro. by Declan Kiberd (London: Methuen 2002), 302pp. |
See also dedicatory poem: Peter Elfed Lewis, Yes, and even you, Thomas Carew, for Brendan Kennelly ([Leeds:] [printed at the University Bibliographical Press] [1963]), [4]pp., 22.5cm. ltd. edn. of 75 printed on grey laid paper; in a manilla envelope [TCD Library].
See also Kelly Younger, from ‘Dionysus in Dublin: Brendan Kennelly’s Greek Triology’: An Interview with the Author, in Journal of Irish Theatre Forum, 2, 2 (Spring 1998) - online. [JITF is archived at UCD.]
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Bibliographical details
Richard Pine, ed., Dark Fathers into Light: Brendan Kennelly [Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies 2] (Bloodaxe 1994) [criticism by Terence Brown, Gerald Dawe, Augustine Martin (on the early poems), and Anthony Roche (on The Book of Judas), Jonathan Allison (on Cromwell), et. al.; incl. editor’s interview with Kennelly].
John McDonagh, Brendan Kennelly: A Host of Ghosts (Dublin: Liffey Press 2004), 170pp. [Chapters: Getting up Early; Old Loyalties: The Boats Are Home; Spilling Selves; Cromwell; The Chaos of Mind; Medea; Following the Judasvoice; Blitzophrenia: Brendan Kennelly’s Postcolonial Vision.]
Internet link: Lynn McBrien [interview], CCN Student News ( January 2, 2001 ) [go online or see attached].
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Commentary
See separate file.
Terence Brown & Michael Longley, foreword to The Essential Brendan Kennelly (2010): ‘Brendan Kennelly is a poet of rare gifts, who at all stages of his career has written distinctive, memorable and powerful poems. We hope that this selection will allow readers to appreciate anew, or for the first time, a body of work that ranges from tender lyricism to the bleakest despair at the human condition, from bawdily comic narrative to the pleasingly epigrammatic squib, from mythic consciousness to social satire ... Yet each literary mode – the lyrical and its obverse, a reductively satirirc assault on "the poetic" – shares what has seemed the basis of all of Kennelly’s poetry: a quest for authenticity of emotion undertaken with high moral intent. In each, as Beckett said of the painter Jack Yeats, the poet “stakes his being”’. |
—Quoted on the Bloodaxe website - online [accessed 24.02.2011] |
Quotations
See with Commentary, infra.
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References
Peter Fallon & Seán Golden, ed, Soft Day, a Miscellany of Contemporary Irish Writing (Dublin: Wolfhound Press; Notree Dame UP 1980), selects ‘The Thatcher’; ‘The Swimmer; ‘Bread’; ‘Proof’.
Patrick Crotty, ed., Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 1995), selects “from Cromwell: “Three Tides” [194], Vintage” [195].
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Notes
Dark fathers?: Kennelly’s poem “My Dark Fathers” possible owes something to Patrick Kavanagh’s lines in “Dark Ireland”: ‘We are a dark people, / Our eyes are ever turned / Inwards / Watching the liar who twists / The hill-paths awry. / O false fondler with what / Was mde lovely / In a garden!’ (Quoted in Sister Una Agnew, The Mystical Imagination of Patrick Kavanagh, Columba Press 1998, pp.28.
‘River of Words’, RTE Wed. 26 June 1994, ‘Brendan Kennelly’ [ Previous two numbers dealt with George Fitzmaurice and J. B. Keane].
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Cromwell: Seamus Heaney has written of ‘a male cult whose founding fathers were Cromwell, William of Orange, and Edward Carson’, and whose godhead is figuratively Roman, “incarnate in a rex or caesar resident in a place in London”’ (Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1980, p.57; quoted in Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, ‘British Romans and Irish Carthaginians: Anticolonial Metaphor in Heaney, Friel and McGuinness, PMLA, March 1996, pp.222-36, p.229.)
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Irish epic: Brendan Kennelly called Michael Farrell’s novel Thy Tears Might Cease (1963) the first Irish novel of epic stature since Ulysses in a (Hermathena review (XCIX, Autumn 1964) [See further under Farrell, infra].
Summer School: The Brendan Kennelly Summer School was inaugurated at Ballylongford on 9-12 Aug. 2001 with guests incl. Desmond Fitzgerald (Knight of Glin), Theo Dorgan, Miriam Purtill, and John McDonagh [email].
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Toyota-town: Bob Quinn, Maverick: A Dissident View of Broadcasting (2001), writes: ‘Even allowing for the possible geriatrification of my taste buds, I could not see how on every conceivable occasion the offer of, say, a free t-shirt made of recycled Kellogg’s Corn Flakes to everyone in the [Late Late Show] audience was contributing more than a sick joke to the gaiety of the nation. Nor could I see how giving a free, show-long promotion to a Toyota car so that somebody could drive it away buckshee and total it on a stone wall in Ballyjamesduff made good economic sense, even if the vehicle was endorsed by a poet [i.e., Brendan Kennelly].’ (Aubrey Dillon-Malone, review, Books Ireland, Dec. 2001, p.328.)
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Judas (the play): Stage version of The Book of Judas preparted for Theatre Unlimited by Maciek Resczcynski; produced at Kilkenny Arts Fest., with Adrian Dunbar as Jesus, and Phelim Drew as Judas. Resczcynski previously dramatised Cromwell for Kavanagh’s Yearly gathering at Carrickmacross, and later at Trinity College, Dublin, GMB, transferring to Damer Hall and onwards to Bush Th., London; Resczcynski worked with Contemporary Theatre Co. of Wroclaw, which brought Birthrate to the Dublin Th. Fest. in 1982 and returned the year after with its production of Finnegans Wake; Resczcynski m. Dáire Brehan, prev. of DU Players; set up Theatre Unlimited in Kilkenny; has played Tom McIntyre such as Dance for Your Daddy; now lives in England as computer-whizz for BBC; Judas perf. Kilkenny Arts Fest., 12-20 Aug. 2000 (Report in Irish Times, 5 Aug. 2000.)
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The dancing man: Kennelly writes of his father, a man who liked to begin each day with a little dance, whom he remembers thus before mind and body were broken. (See video of poem readings on Bloodaxe website - online; accessed 24.02.2011.)
Michael Hartnett dedicated “Farewell of English” (1975) to Kennelly (Collected Poems, Gallery 2003, pp.141-47.)
Declan Kiberd has a chapter entitled ‘Protholics and Cathestants’ in Inventing Ireland (1995), p.418ff.
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