“We are gradually harvesting for good the energy of the whirlpool…”

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” is a line from the unfinished essay A Defence of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley. A claim, hard to stand up these days when too much poetry has hedged its bets on bland, post modern subjectivism.

But in the quiet, often understated work of Michael Longley, who has died, lies a courageous willingness to take on what many never found the words to express about the complex ways Northern Ireland would change after its embrace of peace.

The archives of Slugger are peppered with fragments of his thoughts and wisdom, not least this seminal quote grabbed at the time by Pete Baker after a tip off from one of our Irish American readers at the time, Susan:

It’s how we interact with one another, civilization. On the one hand, I’m interested in how we avoid tearing one another to pieces. Peace is not that, peace is the absence of that, peace is the absence of war: the opposite of war is custom, customs, and civilization. Civilization is custom and manners and ceremony, the things that Yeats says in “A Prayer for My Daughter.”

We have a vocabulary of how to deal with one another and how to behave, a vocabulary of behaviour, as well as things to say to one another . . . and out of that come laws and agreed ways of doing things . . . and that in daily life are a bit like form in poetry.

Baker also dug out some real gems, including this one where he notes how in NI identity has been reduced to a “pathological political form”. It was filmed in 2007 as part of the Digging Deeper conference:

In the wilful blindness of a pragmatic peace process, Longley lent us a vision to see clearly what the future could and would hold. In 1994 he wrote “I get down on my knees and do what must be done / And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.”

Thirty years later, in 2024, NI passed its first full year without a paramilitary style shooting. Wider society has changed showing how the complexity that Longley witnessed in his poetry has become a firm and increasingly noticeable reality in daily life.

Regardless of the successes and failures the peace has deepened. The economy (at least in areas where infrastructure enables it) is prospering. Draperstown, for example, is famous locally for attracting more people for work each day than leave it.

Patricia Craig in her marvellous and heartfelt obit in the Guardian notes how Heaney once described him as “a keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders”. Don Patterson “he has precisely the ‘unswerving gaze’ Pinter called for”.

In his Pinter lecture he outlined the response that he and his poet friends had during the traumatic period which saw the onset of the Troubles…

We believed that poetry, the opposite of propaganda, should encourage people to think and feel for themselves: it should appeal to their “generous instinct”, as MacNeice said in the violent 1930s. We hated what we came to call “Troubles trash”. We believed that, even when generated by the best of intentions, bad poetry about the sufferings of fellow citizens would be an impertinence; as part of an agenda it would be a blasphemy.

Longley held a poetic space open that otherwise might have closed, safe from the easy polarising takes of identity politics, the intellectual hatreds that Yeats warns of in Prayer for my Daughter and the grim “angrynomics” of Troubles era Northern Ireland.

In doing so he helped many of us survive the future, and embrace the necessary, if at times deeply unpalatable, changes that have helped remake our once narrow world into something altogether more vibrant, accepting and ambitious.

Mick Fealty

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty