Learning about Dying: Mutability and the Classics in the Poetry of Michael Longley

Michael Longley has frequently been spoken of as a "classicist." Indeed, Longley studied classics at university, and revealed an interest in the Odyssey in his first volume, No Continuing City (1969). Occasional classical references can be found in Longley's next three volumes, but the description of Longley as a classicist has seemed particularly appropriate in the last decade, as Gorse Fires (1991)and The Ghost Orchid (1995) demonstrated an extended engagement with such classical texts as the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. In Longley's most recent collection, no individual classical author or text finds the centrality that the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Metamorphoses did in the two previous books, but there are many poems in The Weather in Japan (2000) that draw on classical contexts, including several that draw on Homer and several that overtly place Longley as poet in a classicist tradition. Cheeky and ironic, "Remembering the Poets" imagines personal relationships with a cluster of classical authors, before claiming a place for the poet himself as "the last of the singing line." ¹ The "classicist" label, however, is frequently used to gesture toward more fundamental and general characteristics of Longley's writing, and it is this that provides a useful way of approaching the more general theme of Longley's relationship to mutability, dislocation, and loss.

 

John Lyon has identified Longley with a "classicist" tradition of formal beauty, control, conservation, and conservatism, but argues that Ovid has, in fact, been a disruptive presence within this tradition. He quotes Hofmann and Lasdun's comments on the Metamorphoses' postmodern and cinematic qualities, ² and suggests that Longley's Ovidian poems "run counter to Ovid—or at least counter to Hofmann's and Lasdun's characterising of Ovid": "Longley seems to be impelled to write against the facts of metamorphosis and mutability and in resistance to shape-shifting, and, indeed, narrative." In Lyon's view "narrative" is associated with mutability rather than with fixity and reductiveness. Lyon goes on to claim that "Longley is, in a simple sense, a conservative writer":

Longley's conservatism is most properly described in formal terms—his classicism; the major place of translation and recreation in his poetic practice; the decorum of his writing; his determination to 'strive towards clarity' [. . .]; his love of the controlling periodic sentence, a single such sentence often being sustained over an entire poem; his attraction to patternings involving circularity, completion and closure; the adherence to traditional poetic genres, stanza forms and rhythms [. . .]; the prevalence of names, lists, catalogues and inventories. ³

The article is mostly devoted to Longley's tendency to use lists, and Lyon makes a close link between Longley's listing and his "conservatism":

In Longley's verse, lists and catalogues characteristically pursue continuity, coherence and order and resist the multifarious, the diverse and the helter-skelter effects we might associate with listings in Rabelaisian or Joycean writing and in nonsense verse. Indeed such lists register, in Longley, a characteristic and conservative pursuit of sense and order, serving as a still point in, and a small defence against, a world which can appear, on occasion, bafflingly disordered. ⁴

Defying current trends in criticism, Lyon regards Longley's poetry positively despite aligning it with "decorum," order, and conservatism. Ovid has certainly always occupied a peripheral and uncertain place in traditional classical scholarship. As Charles Martindale remarks, "the shifts of tone in Ovid disconcert critics for whom Virgil constitutes an unalterable norm." ⁵ Lyon's alignment of "classicism" with order, sense, coherence and continuity is a valid appraisal of the values of what is probably the central strand of the classical scholarly tradition. This is a significant dimension in the historical formation of a connection between "myth" and order, since "myth" takes a central place in classical literature and scholarship. ⁶ It is notable that Longley has written only three poems drawing on Irish...