Learning about Dying: Mutability and the Classics in the Poetry of Michael Longley

Abstract

Michael Longley has frequently been spoken of as a Indeed, Long ley studied classics at university, and revealed an interest in Odyssey in his first volume, No Continuing City (1969). Occasional classical references can be found in Longley's next three volumes, but description of Longley as a clas sicist has seemed particularly appropriate in last decade, as Gorse Fires (1991) and The Ghost Orchid (1995) demonstrated an extended engagement with such classical texts as Iliad, Odyssey, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. In Longley's most recent collection, no individual classical author or text finds centrali ty that Iliad, Odyssey and Metamorphoses did in two previous books, but there are many poems in The Weather in Japan (2000) that draw on classical contexts, including several that draw on Homer and several that overt ly place Longley as poet in a tradition. Cheeky and ironic, Remem bering Poets imagines personal relationships with a cluster of classical authors, before claiming a place for poet himself as the last of singing line.1 The classicist label, however, is frequently used to gesture toward more fundamental and general characteristics of Longley's writing, and it is this that provides a useful way of approaching more general theme of Longley's rela tionship to mutability, dislocation, and loss.