The great war and all that ina hundred doors by Michael Longley

Abstract

The Great War has featured regularly in Michael Longley’s poetry, for personal, family, aesthetic and political reasons. His collection published in 2011 under the title A Hundred Doors contains a number of poems relating to his father and the so-called War Poets, in connection with others in which love and nature, life and death are also dominant themes. This article will show how, as elsewhere in his poetry, everything is interrelated, “the nature poetry”, in Longley’s words, “fertilizing the war poetry”.