Biography of Eamon Grennan (1941 – )
Eamon Grennan (1941 – ) is an Irish poet born in Dublin. He has lived in the United States, except for brief periods, since 1964. He is Dexter M. Ferry Jr. Professor of English at Vassar College.
Though his Irish roots are clear in his poetry, Grennan has an international sense of literary tradition. He has cited as influences American poets including Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop (herself an international poet with ties to the U.S., Canada, and Brazil). At Vassar, he has taught Shakespeare along with Yeats and Joyce, and he has translated Giacomo Leopardi and – with classicist Rachel Kitzinger – Sophocles.
Grennan studied at University College, Dublin, where he met poets Derek Mahon and Eavan Boland, and at Harvard University, and began teaching at Vassar in 1974. He returned to Ireland fairly briefly, first in 1977 and later in 1981, and began writing poetry there. His first book, Wildly for Days, was published in 1983. Gaelic poetry became an important influence, particularly, he has said, on the sound of his poems. At the same time, he is interested in the sentence as a poetic unit as well as a prose unit.
Other poetry collections are What Light There Is (Gallery Press, 1987); So It Goes (Gallery Press, 1995); Selected and New Poems (Gallery Press, 2000); and Still Life with Waterfall (Gallery Press, 2001). He has also published a collection of essays about modern Irish poetry, Facing the Music (Nevada, Creighton University Press, 1999).
Biography By: This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and uses material adapted in whole or in part from the Wikipedia article on Eamon Grennan.