‘for isaac rosenberg’ Or through the still unfocused sights of a rifle—
AndIsaac Rosenberg wore one behind his ear.^44Endeavouring to ‘make room’ for what has been shut out of popular lit-
erary and historical narratives, Longley’spoetry self-consciously writes from
within—and into—the Rosenberg–Douglas tradition of war poetry overlooked
by the academy.^45 Like his wife, the critic Edna Longley, he is keen to recover
marginalized figures such as Rosenberg in accounts of literary modernism. In his
interview with John Brown in 2000, Longley said:
Pound and Eliot are not among my favourite poets....How many people in the world
actually enjoy them?...Really great English poets like Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen
and Isaac Rosenberg who died in the trenches wouldhave made it more difficult for Pound
and Eliot, more complicated....The war poems of Owen and Rosenberg ring out in my
ears like modern versions of Sophocles and Aeschylus. Utterly modern. Huge. Who cares if
they’re ‘Modernist’?^46
Perhaps more so than any other living poet, Longley is a devotee and literary
successor of the war poets. In his introduction toCenotaph of Snow: Sixty Poems
about War(2003), a chapbook collecting poems written over four decades, Longley
is so embedded in the tradition of British war poetry that he feels the need to put
some distance between himself and the label ‘war poet’:
These are poems about war, not war poems. You have to be a war poet to write war poems.
I am a non-combatant drawn to the subject of war for a number of reasons, including: 1)
my father fought in the First World War, was decorated for bravery and—an old-fashioned
patriot—joined up again in 1939; 2) my native Ulster has been disfigured for thirty years by
fratricidal violence; 3) I revere the poets of 1914–1918 (Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon, Sorley,
Blunden, Thomas, Jones) and their successors of 1939–1945 (Douglas, Lewis); 4) in my
forties I rediscovered Homer, first theOdysseyand then theIliadwhich is the most powerful
(^44) Michael Longley, ‘Bog Cotton’, inCollected Poems(London Jonathan Cape, 2006), 137.
(^45) Longley’s tentative plea to ‘make room’ is made manifest in the long parenthetical section in
the middle (the second and third stanzas) of the four-stanza poem, in which Longley describes bog
cotton:
(It hangs on by a thread, denser than thistledown,
Reluctant to fly, a weather vane that traces
The flow of cloud shadow over monotonous bog—
And useless too, though it might well bring to mind
The plumpness of pillows, the staunching of wounds,
Rags torn from a petticoat and soaked in water
Andtiedtothebushesaroundsomeholywell
As though to make a hospital of the landscape—
Cures and medicines as far as the horizon
Which nobody harvests except with the eye.)
(^46) Longley, interviewed by John Brown, in John Brown,In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from the
North of Ireland(Cliffs of Moher: Salmon Publishing, 2002), 90.