Edna Longley

Edna Longley is an eminent scholar of Irish and British poetry. She has been a close witness of the extraordinary rise of poetry from Northern Ireland since the 1960s. Her groundbreaking books include studies of Louis MacNeice, Edward Thomas, and W. B. Yeats. Her first book, Poetry in the Wars (1987), explores changing representations of war in poetry, British and Irish, from World War I to the Northern Irish Troubles. Later books question assumptions about poetic 'modernism', unsettle correlations of gender and aesthetics,  envision a flexible Northern Irish identity, and reflect on the possibilities for peacemaking in Ireland. Her attunement to shifting identities and allegiances, the marginal and canonical, undergirds her important editions and anthologies. She is currently working on an edition of Edward Thomas's critical writings on poetry.