Michael Longley
The decades following the Second World War saw a generation of poets working in English grapple with questions of violence, landscape, and lyric form in ways that tested the boundaries of inherited tradition. Michael Longley, born in Belfast on 27 July 1939, emerged from that climate as a poet writing in English whose work was rooted in the particular textures of Irish and Northern Irish life.
Educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and later at Trinity College, Dublin, Longley worked as both a teacher and a writer over the course of his career. He was a citizen of the United Kingdom and composed his poetry in English throughout his life. In a statement that illuminates his understanding of the creative act, Longley described the source of poems as a mystery: "If I knew where poems came from I would go there," he said, characterizing the writing of a poem as "moving into unknown territory and hoping to be surprised by some kind of redemptive eloquence to cast light into dark corners." That account of poetry as discovery rather than prescription is consistent with a body of work that accumulated recognition across several decades.
The honors Longley received over his lifetime were considerable. He was awarded the Eric Gregory Award, the Cholmondeley Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Costa Book Award for Poetry, the PEN Pinter Prize, and the King's Gold Medal for Poetry, and he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Longley died in Belfast on 22 January 2025. Following his death, the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, described him as "a peerless poet."
Quotes by Michael Longley
I think a philistine environment should be bracing for young artists. You have to make your own enjoyment, you’ve got to make your own art.
I don’t know where the shape of a poem comes from. I certainly don’t impose it. I write out of a jumble of emotions and vague notions and scraps of knowledge. At some stage a form or, rather, a shape mysteriously emerges.
I suppose that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating oeuvre is unavoidable.
I was the first Arts Council official in the archipelago to do something for what you might call indigenous music.
The job has left me with a healthy disregard for what you might call Public Life. I have no desire now to go to receptions, to be seen at gatherings of the great and the good, to stand and be bored to death by men in grey suits.
A good poem is not completely a poem until it has received a critical response that grows out of the poem in an almost biological way.
I work hard to make the poems as good as they can be, and if they’re not good enough I scrap them. I find it difficult after a gap of a few years to tinker – I’m more likely to destroy.
I would insist that poetry is a normal human activity and its proper concern all the things that happen to people.
I’m not against ambition and reach, but if you can say it in four lines, why waste your time saying it in more? Challenge the world by all means, but it’s bad for your poetry to take steroids.