The death of the poet Michael Longley on Jan. 22, 2025, at the age of 85 did not occasion the same volume of obituaries and encomiums as that of his fellow Belfast poet Seamus Heaney in 2013 (at least on this side of the pond), but in his native Ireland, Longley was lauded by literary, social and political figures alike for his many contributions to Irish literature and to the cause of social reconciliation.
Many years ago, Heaney had described Longley as “a keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders.” Obituaries this week offered similar sentiments. A Belfast politician called Longley a “prince of language.” Irish president Michael D. Higgins called him “a peerless poet” and wrote the following in a public statement:
Michael Longley will be recognised as one of the greatest poets that Ireland has ever produced, and it has long been my belief that his work is of the level that would be befitting of a Nobel Prize for Literature. The range of his work was immense, be it from the heartbreak of loss to the assurance of the resilience of beauty in nature.
Longley was born in Belfast in 1939 to English parents. He earned a degree from Trinity College Dublin, where he first started writing poetry (and met Derek Mahon, another legendary Belfast poet). After stints teaching in Dublin, London and then Belfast again, he became a director of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in 1970, a position he would hold for 21 years. His first book of poetry, Ten Poems, came out in 1965. More than 40 books would follow, including Gorse Fires (which won the Whitbread Poetry Prize) and The Weather in Japan (which earned him the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Hawthornden Prize). His last collection, The Slain Birds, was published in 2022.
Longley’s poetry was known for its many classical allusions, but also for its intense focus on the physical landscapes of County Mayo and other rural areas of Ireland. And it would of course be almost impossible to make Belfast one’s home during “The Troubles,” the period of conflict between Catholic and Protestant factions (and the Irish Republican Army and the British army) that lasted from the late 1960s to the late 1990s, without focusing on the political and social situation in Northern Ireland.
A classic case of Longley’s blend of political, pastoral and classical themes is his famous poem “Ceasefire,” written in 1994 amid rumors that warring factions in Northern Ireland might agree to a cessation of hostilities. Longley said he wrote the piece in order to cajole more militant elements in the struggle to agree to a ceasefire. The writer Patricia Craig called it “one of the most prescient and significant poems of the Troubles era.” Using the frame of the scene in “The Iliad” where King Priam of Troy visits Achilles to collect the body of his son Hector, Longley closes with this stanza:
I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.
The “Good Friday Agreement” would finally be signed four years later, signaling an end to most of the violence associated with “The Troubles.”
Longley’s was not a name that appeared often in America—the magazine favored his pal Heaney—but a 1976 article by frequent contributor T. P. O’Mahoney (an Italian, obviously) did mention a reading Longley gave in Belfast at the height of “The Troubles”:
The guest poet for the night was Michael Longley, a native of the city. His charming wife, Edna, who teaches English at Queen’s University across the city, was also there, as well as Lelia Doolan, a former artistic director of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. The poet, bearded and with a slightly pedantic air, opened the proceedings by talking about the nature and function of his art.
Longley was interrupted, O’Mahoney reported, by “a grim-faced, middle-aged man who thought that the claims being made by Mr. Longley in relation to poetry were extravagant. Others joined in. What use was poetry anyway? And after a reference to the decadent character and life style of famous poets, one woman wanted to know if men of this kind were capable of ‘good’ poetry. Oh yes, said the poet, without hesitation, even if one took the term ‘good’ in a moral sense.”
More on that below.
Longley, O’Mahoney noted, also got a good laugh “when he stopped once to tell us he had been the first man to direct a certain popular vulgarism at the Pope on Radio Telefis Eireann when a poem of his containing that imprecatory line (and which he had just recited for us) was broadcast not once, but twice.” (Ten to one the poem was “Wounds,” from 1973, and I’m not repeating the imprecatory line here.)
Raised agnostic, Longley chose to identify himself as a “sentimental disbeliever” later in life. In a 2015 interview, he noted that “when I went to school, the Catholic Church made sure that Catholics didn’t go to [the same schools]. When I went to Trinity, McQuaid and the Irish bishops made sure that Catholics didn’t go to Trinity. You might call it a kind of apartheid operating, invisibly.” Later, when he returned to Belfast, “Seamus Heaney and his wife to be, Marie Devlin, were the first Catholics who became close friends.”
Writing of him in The Catholic Herald in 2024, frequent America contributor Nick Ripatrazone described Longley as “a poet whose vision has moved in the direction of transcendence,” and argued that his “accumulated poems demonstrate sustained engagement with matters of the soul.” Ripatrazone also quoted Longley: “The Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, are as good a system to live by as any that I can think of, and I love them. I love them.”
Longley is survived by his wife Edna, an Irish scholar and literary critic, and their three children.
The goal of good poetry, he told Krista Tippett in a 2016 episode of “On Being,” involves “making people more human, making them more intelligent, making them more sensitive and emotionally pure than they might otherwise be.” Longley himself described poetry as “useless” in that interview—echoing that question asked in Belfast so many years before—but added a caveat:
But it doesn’t mean to say that it’s without value. It’s without use, but it has value. It is valuable. And the first people that dictators try to get rid of are the poets and the artists, the novelists and the playwrights. They burn their books. They’re terrified of what poetry can do.
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Little Skate,” by Lynne Viti. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
Doris Grumbach, L.G.B.T. pioneer and fearless literary critic
What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
