This volume identifies and explains all the Classics-related poems in Michael Longley's oeuvre. All his engagements with Greek and Roman literature are made accessible to non-specialists and are shown to work both obliquely (e.g. commenting indirectly on his times) and reciprocally (using modern contexts to illuminate ancient originals).
A substantial portion of Michael Longley's work is inspired by the literatures of ancient Greece and Rome which he studied at university. He said that these classically-inspired poems were 'at the core of my efforts'. In this volume Longley explains in an interview what his classical education meant to him and what it did for him—inter alia, it instilled a command of syntax which 'enabled virtuosic display', and revealed a 'mythology which explains us to ourselves and helps us to make sense of our predicaments'.
The volume is written by classicists, trained in the discipline in which Longley was trained. In ten survey chapters Maureen Alden (who, in the course of a forty-year friendship with the poet often suggested passages which might interest and inspire him) provides comprehensive and classically-focused coverage of the classical references and allusions in Longley's oeuvre, his use of the ancient texts—'spiritual echo chambers'—for his own poetic purposes, and the role of the classically-inspired poems in the structure of each collection.
In specialist chapters David Larmour explores the Ovidian versions of The Ghost Orchid; Paul Allen Miller discusses Longley's early poem 'Cornelia', a version of 'Propertius's great death ode' 4.11, and his later versions of the same poem; and Seth Schein examines how Longley achieves his freeze-framing technique and how his elegies can achieve an emotional power even greater than that of the original in the Iliad.
The survey chapters are illustrated by a table detailing all the 'classical' poems with exact references, dates, and summary notes. A timeline indicates key events of the poet's life together with an outline of the political events on which ancient texts, especially Homer, allowed him to comment obliquely. Michael Longley read and approved the entire text except that which concerns his last collection which is to appear in 2027.
