tara christie
of all war poems as well as being the greatest poem about death....These,then, are the
preoccupations behindCenotaph of Snow.^47
For Longley’s audience, this recent declaration of reverence for ‘the poets of
1914–1918’ is more a synthesis in retrospect than a new-found conclusion. InThe
Great War and Modern Memory(1975), Paul Fussell identified Longley as ‘Another
to whom the Great War established an archetype for subsequent violence—as well
as a criticism of it’.^48 In 1980, Paul Durcan claimed: ‘The First World War (which
was the beginning of the Irish tragedy as indeed it was the beginning of every other
convulsion in the western world in the 20th century) has been the primal landscape
of Longley’s poetry from the start.’^49 Most recently inThe Great War in Irish
Poetry(2000), Fran Brearton has explained that ‘the title ‘‘war poet’’ is attributed
to [Longley] perhaps even more frequently than to Heaney, even if Heaney, as the
more popular figure, has been exposed to greater ‘‘war poet’’ pressures from the
public’.^50
Longley’s unfaltering devotion to, and deep-seated identification with, the British
war poets raises several questions about what is at stake in this self-proclaimed
literary lineage. The hybridity of Longley’s Anglo-Irish identity politics poses certain
challenges. In the Irish poetic tradition, Longley is marginalized for his Englishness,
for what is often interpreted as his Protestant literary Unionism, his poetry’s
cultural, political, aesthetic, and literary ties to mainland Britain. Longley himself
recalled that as a child he ‘walked out of an English household on to Irish streets’
and felt that he was ‘schizophrenic on the levels of nationality, class and culture’.^51
Yet in the English poetic tradition, Longley—like Louis MacNeice before him—is
marginalized for his Irishness. Like Rosenberg, Longley does not fit into ready-made
categories. Brearton points out that Longley is
obviously involved in an Irish tradition but he also builds on an English tradition. In fact
he is in the tradition of dealing with tensions between traditions. He is constantly talking
about Englishness and Irishness, urban and pastoral....It was much easier to recognise
Heaney as a rural Irish Catholic....And even someone like [Derek] Mahon was more easily
identifiable with his urban Belfast angst. Longley didn’t fit either of those patterns and so it
made it more difficult for him to find a niche.^52
Given Longley’s admiration for Rosenberg, we might question to what extent
Longley’s quest for a place within the complicated fracture points of a hybridized
(^47) Longley, title-page,Cenotaph of Snow: Sixty Poems about War(London: Enitharmon Press,
2003), 2.
(^48) Paul Fussell,The Great War and Modern Memory(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 324.
(^49) Paul Durcan, ‘Poetry and Truth’,Irish Press, 20 Mar. 1980, 6.
(^50) Brearton,The Great War in Irish Poetry, 261.
(^51) Longley, ‘Strife and the Ulster Poet’,Hibernia, 7 Nov. 1969, 11.
(^52) Brearton, quoted in Nicholas Wroe, ‘Middle Man’,The Guardian, 21 Aug. 2004;http://books.
guardian.co.uk/poetry/features/0,12887,1287473,00.html