“To live like a tree, lonely and free / To live as brothers like trees in a forest”

About Edna Longley

Edna Longley, literary critic and cultural commentator, is an emerita professor in the School of English, Queen's University Belfast. She is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her main interests are modern poetry, Irish literature, and Irish cultural politics. Her publications include Poetry & Posterity (2000). She is editor of The Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry from Britain and Ireland (2000) and Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (2008); and co-editor (with Peter Mackay and Fran Brearton) of Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry (2011) and (with Fran Brearton) of Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his Legacy (2012).

Articles by Edna Longley

No Passports

Edna Longley 8 January 2013

Complexity needs a voice (this also applies to newer emigrant groups on both islands). Politics and autobiography, politics and culture, can drift too far apart. Gaps in the public discourse of the UK and the Irish Republic allow ethnic assertion to punch above its weight. And then there is poetry. ( 5,000 words)

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