General

Obituary: Michael Longley CBE, Poet (27 July 1939 - 22 January 2025)

23rd January, 2025

The Arts Council has learned with great sadness that Michael Longley, one of the great Northern Ireland poets of the last century, died yesterday, Wednesday 22nd January 2025.

Poets Michael Longley and Frank Ormsby seated beside Arts Council Chair Liam Hannaway in a hotel lobby
Pictured (L-R): Distinguished Northern Irish poets, Michael Longley and Frank Ormsby, pictured with the Chair of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Liam Hannaway. Photo: Brian Morrison

Michael Longley was born in Belfast, educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and read classics at Trinity College Dublin. After a number of years teaching in Dublin, London and Belfast, he joined the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, serving as Director of Combined Arts from 1970 until his retirement in 1991.

He is the author of many acclaimed poetry collections, including Angel Hill (2017); The Stairwell (2015), which received the 2015 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The Ghost Orchid (2012); The Weather in Japan (2000), which won the Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry, the Hawthornden Prize, and the T.S. Eliot Prize; and Gorse Fires (1991), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Prize. Shortly after his 81st birthday, he launched his 12th poetry collection, The Candlelight Master (Jonathan Cape), dedicated to his wife, the literary critic and cultural commentator Edna Longley.

Longley’s influence as a poet was far reaching. He became a father figure to several generations of new writers and artists, across the disciplines, an advocate, a listening ear, an artist whose own high-altitude practice served as a standard against which artists came to measure their work. Subsequent generations of poets in particular, including some of the most lauded, have attested to his influence as a writer and guide - distinguished poets, including Medbh McGuckian, Frank Ormsby, Robert Johnstone and Leontia Flynn.

His debut volume, No Continuing City (1969), heralded the arrival of a powerful new voice in Northern Ireland’s literary scene, working alongside his close friends, the poets Derek Mahon and Seamus Heaney, and playwright Stewart Parker.

Longley remained at his post in Northern Ireland during the full period of the Northern Ireland Troubles, fulfilling an artistic but also a civic role, where his quiet voice for tolerance, fairness and remembrance registered powerfully among much noisier and less helpful attitudes.

Known for his use of Greek and Roman mythology to cast new light on contemporary issues, his most famous poem, ‘Ceasefire’, which makes direct reference to Homer’s Iliad to draw links between conflicts past and present, was published just days after a ceasefire was announced in Northern Ireland in 1994. ‘Ceasefire’ addresses the difficulty of overcoming the past and trying to break a cycle of violence: ‘I get down on my knees and do what must be done / And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son’.

After winning the Wilfred Own Prize in 2003, Longley became renowned for chronicling aspects of grief and remembrance arising out of major 20th century conflicts: World War One, where his father saw action and received the Military Cross; World War Two, especially the Holocaust, which occasioned a groundbreaking memoir he assisted with the dancer and death-camp survivor Helen Lewis, A Time To Speak (Blackstaff 1997), as well as memorable poems on the Jewish experience in general.

He was also very preoccupied with the beauty of the natural world and developed his own unique voice writing about flowers, wildlife and landscapes, particularly those of the countryside he described as his ‘soul landscape’, Carrigskeewaun in Co Mayo.

On a par with these themes, Longley was one of the pre-eminent English language love poets of the century, helping to reaffirm that the domesticities of private life and its gestures rank at least as highly as the epic visions of conflict. Love, war and the natural world became the playgrounds for his unique imagination, which encompassed the full range of his artform’s historic concerns.

During his time at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, his achievements were innovative and enduring. He fashioned the Literature Department into the supportive model it is today, and initiated the support of local publishing, notably Blackstaff Press, which ushered in decades of new work from Irish writers. He took a lead role in developing the support of the Traditional Arts, including music and storytelling, and, in 1979, he led the support for what became known as Community Arts, a novelty in these islands at the time, and a milestone in broadening the definition of the arts and recognising their grassroots impulse.

Longley, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and member of Aosdana, was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2001, and from 2007 to 2010 held the post of Ireland Professor of Poetry. He was made a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2010 and, as late as 2022, was awarded the €250,000 Feltrinelli International Poetry Prize, from the Accademia dei Lincei.

The stature of the poet was captured in Where Poems Come From, a remarkable film produced for the BBC by DoubleBand Films and Lone Star Productions, released in 2024, which documented the poet, the man, and the chosen places of his attention. The title references another of Longley’s gifts – his renowned quick wit and good humour. Asked where poetry came from, he responded with “If I knew where poems came from, I would go there”. It is available to watch on the BBC iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001wdpy/michael-longley-where-poems-come-from

Roisín McDonough, Chief Executive of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland paid tribute to Mr Longley: “For sixty years, Michael Longley has been one of the towering figures of Northern Ireland arts. He was one of our truly great poets, one of the most respected and influential of his generation, his name spoken alongside Heaney, Carson and Mahon, all of whom are sadly now no longer with us. Today we have lost a guide, a friend, an inspiration. But his poetry will last. And it will be cherished by generations to come. Our heartfelt sympathies are with his wife, Edna, and their three children.”