Michael Longley: Poet in No Man's Land

Abstract

‘I am still of [the] opinion’, Yeats writes, ‘that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mind – sex and the dead’. Echoing this attitude, Longley states ‘[m]y concerns continue to be Eros and Thanatos, the traditional subject-matter of the lyric’, concerns that are focused for him by ‘the natural world’ and by ‘the catastrophe of the First World War, the influence of that catastrophe on subsequent Irish and European history and politics’. Those two things – the war and the natural world – like love and death, impinge upon each other throughout his work; both inform a psychic landscape that, Yeatsian-style, is always characterised by awareness of its dual possibilities. Paul Durcan notes the grounding of Longley’s aesthetic in the landscape, literal and metaphorical, of the Great War, a grounding which has coloured all his collections from the early No Continuing City through to the recent The Ghost Orchid: ‘Longley’s themes: Of Love and War. The First World War (which was the beginning of the Irish tragedy as indeed it was the beginning of every other convulsion in the western world in the twentieth century) has been the primal landscape of Longley’s poetry from the start’.