He was born in Ballylongford, Co Kerry on 17th April 1936 and was educated at the inter-denominational St. Ita's College, Tarbert, Co. Kerry, and at Trinity College, where he edited Icarus. Kennelly graduated from Trinity and wrote his PhD thesis there. He also studied at Leeds University.

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 town 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 (1995).

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 to the later works of 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.

In regard to the oral tradition, Kennelly is a great reciter of verse with tremendous command and the rare ability to recall extended poems by memory, both his own work and others, and recite them on call verbatim.

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 Wordlanguage is a human miracle always in danger of drowning in a sea of familiarity.”