In Memoriam: Michael Longley (1939-2025)
On behalf of the TCD Department of Classics we would like to express our heartfelt condolences to the family of Michael Longley, one of our Department’s most illustrious alumni. May he rest in peace. We are pleased to be able to publish this piece in Michael’s memory, written by Professor Stephen Harrison of the University of Oxford.
Michael Longley at Corrymeela, Ballycastle, co. Antrim, July 2012: By Andrewincowtown: CC BY-SA 4.0
The death on 22nd January of Michael Longley sadly removes a third of the great generation of poets born in the island of Ireland in the late 1930s and early 1940s who have been significant figures in the modern poetic reception of Greek and Roman classics in English, after Seamus Heaney in 2013 and Derek Mahon in 2020. Longley’s contribution here was remarkable and extended over six decades, and we are lucky enough to have his own lively account of his use of classical material in his verse (an essay in the volume Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English, which I edited in 2009). As he tells us there, Longley studied classics at TCD in the late 1950s and was particularly inspired by the then Regius Professor of Greek, W.B. Stanford, who took an interest in him.
Longley’s best known classical poetry is linked with Homer (one of Stanford’s specialisms), always short works which crystallised a moment from the Greek epics and made it relevant to his own time and place. These emerged some years after his TCD education, what he called ‘the Homeric adventure of my fifties and sixties’. I think of the powerful poems which make the link between the violence of the Troubles and that of the Homeric world: ‘The Butchers’, connecting the brutal vengeance of the returned Odysseus on his disloyal goatherd Melanthius in the Odyssey with the notorious methods of the paramilitary Shankill Butchers, ‘The Helmet’, which links the paramilitary leader Johnnie ‘Mad Dog’ Adair with the Iliadic Hector, and the sonnet ‘Ceasefire’, which has a moving and memorable version of the reconciliation between Priam and Achilles over the body of Hector at the end of the Iliad, and was published in the Irish Times immediately after the IRA armistice of August 1994. I think too of the tender poems which draw together the mythological story of Odysseus with Longley’s own relationships with his nurse (‘Eurycleia’), mother (‘Anticleia’) and father (‘Laertes’).
His use of Latin poetry was also rich and rewarding. It began with a particular engagement with the love-elegist Propertius, including a complete rendering of the latter’s last and longest poem, 4.11, in ‘Cornelia’ (1969); he also wrote a complete version of Tibullus 1.10, ‘Peace’ (1976), with clear but general references to contemporary Ulster politics, a response (he tells us) to a challenge from Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, the then recent Nobel Peace Prize laureates, to write on the topic. Earlier than most classical scholars, he also (in ‘Sulpicia’, 1979) showed interest in the work of Sulpicia, Tibullus’ female contemporary whose poems are some of the few extant classical Latin texts authored by women.
He contributed no fewer than seven items to the influential anthology of poetic versions of individual stories from Ovid’s epic Metamorphoses, Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun’s After Ovid (1994), a format which well suited the technique he had developed with Homer of focussing on particular moments in a longer narrative; again, he wrote about these well in his 2009 essay. Not included there, but well worth seeking out in his 2020 collection The Candlelight Master, are his hilarious Ulster-Scots version of three of Catullus’ invective poems in ‘Hochmagandy’ (‘fornication’), and the moving elegy to his twin brother Peter, ‘Brother’, using Catullus’ elegy to his own brother (poem 101); the same brother had been a key focus in his 2014 collection The Stairwell, where Longley returned to his Homeric interests in casting himself as the bereaved Achilles of the funeral of Iliad 23 and his brother as the dead Patroclus.
He was unfailingly kind and helpful to scholars who wanted to write on the classical elements in his poetry, and gave memorable talks on the topic to student and scholarly audiences who much appreciated the wit and pathos of his readings and discussions. Two volumes are currently in progress on his classical receptions, one in the UK, another on the other side of the Atlantic. Those who knew him personally will miss him greatly, and the modern English literature of Ireland has lost a major figure.
Stephen Harrison is Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Oxford