Versatile poet's work ranged from nature to civil strife
BBC NI education and arts correspondent
Read and celebrated across the globe, Michael Longley was born in Belfast in July and lived in the city until his death.
He went to school at Royal Belfast Academical Institution, where a lifelong enjoyment of rugby began.
In the late s he moved to Dublin to study at Trinity College Dublin and it was there, in the company of fellow student poets, including Derek Mahon and Brendan Kennelly, that he became immersed in poetry.
His death was announced on Thursday at the age of
At Trinity he met his future wife Edna - later a professor at Queen's University Belfast (QUB) and a notable critic and writer in her own right.
After their marriage in the mids they settled back in Belfast, where Longley joined a stellar collection of young poets who met regularly to read and talk about each other's work.
The Belfast Group - as it became known - included Longley, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon and others.
They met in pubs close to Queen's University and at the flat of a university lecturer, Prof Phili
Versatile poet's work ranged from nature to civil strife
After Heaney's death in , Longley wrote an elegy called Room to Rhyme about his friend, which was published in his later collection, Angel Hill.
Longley's first collection, No Continuing City, had been published in - just as the Troubles started in Northern Ireland.
No Continuing City included the poem In Memoriam written in memory of Longley's soldier father Richard, who had been wounded in World War One and later died of cancer.
Longley remained in Belfast as the Troubles worsened, writing a number of collections of poetry while working full time for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
Trips with his family to the west of Ireland prompted poetry about nature, but Longley did not avoid writing about the conflict around him.
Poems like The Ice Cream Man, Wounds, Kindertotenlieder, The Linen Workers and Dusty Bluebells reflected the suffering of victims of violence with compassion.
Though Longley was well aware, as he said in a later interview, of the "deadly danger of regarding the agony of others as raw material for your art, or your art as solace for them in their suffering".
In
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Poet Michael Longley was born in the suburbs of Belfast on 27th of July to London parents who had settled in the city in His early background is well described in the autobiographical chapters of Tuppenny Stung () where we read of his childhood: his twin brother, Peter, and his sister, Wendy; his mother's volcanic temperament and its influence on the household; his father's wartime experiences and peacetime activities; his primary education in a city ravaged by sectarianism; his grammar school education with its lack of Irish history on the curriculum. His background was non-literary; he has spoken of the "consternation and embarrassment at home" when he chose Yeats's Collected Poems as a school prize in his teens.
In he went to Trinity College in Dublin to study classics where he found "my already half-hearted hold on Latin and Greek was further enfeebled by a now all-consuming desire to write poetry." After college he worked as a teacher in Dublin, London and Belfast. Back in his native city, he became a member of Philip Hobs
Michael Longley Biography
Michael Longley
poetBorn:
Birthplace: Belfast, Northern Ireland
One of many Northern Irish poets, Seamus Heaney being the most famous, whose emergence in the s coincided with the region's political and sectarian troubles. Longley, born to English parents, was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and read Classics at Trinity College, Dublin. After stints as a schoolteacher in Dublin, London, and Belfast he went to work for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in , retiring in He made his mark with No Continuing City () and An Exploded View (), poems that combined his Northern Irish sensibility with his classical education. The Echo Gate () is regarded as his most important collection. Longley's mature work addresses the political and social troubles in Northern Ireland and the meaning of artistic identity. Gorse Fires () won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. The Weather in Japan () won the Hawthornden Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Irish Times Literary Prize for Poetry. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of Aosdána, an affiliation of artists supported by the Irish Arts Council, Longley is
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