Michael Longley

The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower

— Michael Longley

I would insist that poetry is a normal human activity and its proper concern all the things that happen to people.

— Michael Longley

Most poets' revisions are disastrous. They buckle and dent what was originally forged at a red-hot heat.

— Michael Longley

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…

— Michael Longley

Every Monday morning I try to remember to say "Thank you, Lord. I'm not at the Senior Staff Meeting."

— Michael Longley

I work hard to make the poems as good as they can be, and if they're not good enough I scrap them.…

— Michael Longley

The job has left me with a healthy disregard for what you might call Public Life. I have no desire now to…

— Michael Longley

Of course, when a poem is being born, the reasoning part of the brain throbs away at full throttle, but all the…

— Michael Longley

I hardly ever look at my published books.

— Michael Longley

I suppose that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating oeuvre is unavoidable.

— Michael Longley

For me the form, the stanzaic shape, is an endorsement, proof that I'm engaged with the Latin or Greek at an original…

— Michael Longley

Weddings and funerals have so much in common (except that in Ireland funerals are more fun - better food, better drink): at…

— Michael Longley

I'm not the kind of poet who arranges treasure-hunts to please the academics and keep them busy. Poetry should be surprising in…

— Michael Longley

I don't know where the shape of a poem comes from. I certainly don't impose it. I write out of a jumble…

— Michael Longley

A good poem is not completely a poem until it has received a critical response that grows out of the poem in…

— Michael Longley

I was the first Arts Council official in the archipelago to do something for what you might call indigenous music.

— Michael Longley

When I'm assembling a book I concentrate as though I were writing a poem. A truly imagined arrangement will indicate gaps and…

— Michael Longley

I think a philistine environment should be bracing for young artists. You have to make your own enjoyment, you've got to make…

— Michael Longley

I do feel that a poem needs not just space, but, ideally, space around that space - space for meditation, reverie, subliminal…

— Michael Longley

There's always a danger of writers believing their own publicity. We live in a world of puff and solicited blurb, a world…

— Michael Longley

I'm not against ambition and reach, but if you can say it in four lines, why waste your time saying it in…

— Michael Longley