A tribute to Michael Longley 1939-2025

Posted on: 27 January 2025

Michael Longley, the acclaimed Belfast poet who has died at the age of 85, studied Classics in Trinity where he was awarded an honorary degree in 1999 and was an Honorary Fellow.

Michael Longley, the acclaimed Belfast poet who has died at the age of 85, studied Classics in Trinity where he was awarded an honorary degree in 1999 and was an Honorary Fellow.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.

For more on Michael Longley, please see also Prof.Terence Brown’s piece written for the Trinity Writers series for the School of English in 2016.

The following tribute was written by Dr Nicholas Grene, who was Professor of English Literature in the Trinity School of English from 1999 until his retirement in 2015.

Image used with the kind permission of The Irish Times.

The last time Michael Longley visited Trinity in November 2024 it was to launch a book on the poetry of his old friend Derek Mahon in the Provost’s House. He was slow on his feet but otherwise unchanged: the same presence of quiet authority, the same graceful smile, the soft, gentle Northern voice speaking compellingly of his Trinity days. He had not been a diligent student, he confessed. He said at the end of the Mahon conference which gave rise to the book that he has attended more lectures through that day and a half than through four years reading Classics. But his time in College meant a great deal to him. It was there that he met Mahon, Brendan Kennelly, and Edna Broderick whom he was to marry. It was there, in conversation with those friends, that he hammered out his ideas on literature and began seriously to write his own poetry. And the classical literature which he read there, Homer above all, was to be a crucial element in some of his greatest poems.

Longley joked that he must be the only poet in the world to have written love poems to a critic. What a partnership that was: sixty years of marriage between one of Ireland’s finest poets and one of the very best interpreters of poetry. And he is indeed a great love poet, His first collection No Continuing City (1969) was dedicated to Edna and opened with his marriage tribute ‘Epithalamion’. Later there was the wonderfully tender ‘The Linen Industry’ and ‘An Amish Rug’. But his love lyrics were related to his delighted appreciation of the whole world of art and nature. His showed his responsiveness to music in the sequence ‘Words for Jazz Perhaps’. Landscapes, flowers, and animals of all sorts are everywhere beautifully celebrated in his poetry. His last collection was The Slain Birds published in 2022. For over fifty years, Carrigskeewaun, the wild area of Mayo where the family went every summer, was central to his imagination.

If Carrickskeewaun was one centre, Belfast was the other. Mahon, in his rueful poem ‘Afterlives’, wondered what it would have been like if he had stayed home and ‘lived it bomb by bomb’. That is indeed just what Longley did for years, working as literature officer for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and then as an independent writer. All Northern poets of his generation felt the need to respond to the terrible time of political violence, but few did so more movingly than Longley. The sequence ‘Wreaths’, the lovely poem ‘The Ice-cream Man’, commemorate victims of the Troubles, never sparing readers the blank horror of the deaths, but in their formal articulation reaching out in compassion to those lost lives. It was fitting that Michael Longley, who had so tellingly witnessed the time of the Troubles, who with Edna had done so much for the cultural life of the city, should have been made a Freeman of Belfast in 2015.

It was only one among any number of honours for his work: the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whitbread Prize, the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, the Feltrinelli International Prize for Poetry and, not the least valued by Longley, the Honorary Fellowship of Trinity College to which he was elected in 2018. However, it is not for all these honours and awards that Michael Longley will be remembered but for that extraordinary, richly worked body of lyrical poetry which he has left to us.

ENDS