I'm not against ambition and reach, but if you can say it in four lines, why waste your time saying it in more? Challenge the world by all means, but it's bad for your poetry to take steroids. — Michael Longley Copy Share Image
The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower — Michael Longley Copy Share
I would insist that poetry is a normal human activity and its proper concern all the things that happen to people. — Michael Longley Copy Share
Most poets' revisions are disastrous. They buckle and dent what was originally forged at a red-hot heat. — Michael Longley Copy Share
In America, where you'd have thought the country's so huge it couldn't happen quite so cosily, everyone's giving his imprimatur to everyone else. You… — Michael Longley Copy Share
Every Monday morning I try to remember to say "Thank you, Lord. I'm not at the Senior Staff Meeting." — Michael Longley Copy Share
I work hard to make the poems as good as they can be, and if they're not good enough I scrap them. I find… — Michael Longley Copy Share
The job has left me with a healthy disregard for what you might call Public Life. I have no desire now to go to… — Michael Longley Copy Share
Of course, when a poem is being born, the reasoning part of the brain throbs away at full throttle, but all the other areas… — Michael Longley Copy Share
I suppose that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating oeuvre is unavoidable. — Michael Longley Copy Share
For me the form, the stanzaic shape, is an endorsement, proof that I'm engaged with the Latin or Greek at an original level, that… — Michael Longley Copy Share
Weddings and funerals have so much in common (except that in Ireland funerals are more fun - better food, better drink): at both, our… — Michael Longley Copy Share
I'm not the kind of poet who arranges treasure-hunts to please the academics and keep them busy. Poetry should be surprising in deeper ways. — Michael Longley Copy Share
I don't know where the shape of a poem comes from. I certainly don't impose it. I write out of a jumble of emotions… — Michael Longley Copy Share
A good poem is not completely a poem until it has received a critical response that grows out of the poem in an almost… — Michael Longley Copy Share
