Ireland Remembers Legendary Poet Richard Murphy

Revered Irish poet Richard Murphy has died at the age of 90. "A regular broadcaster on RTÉ and the BBC, his work is included in many anthologies. He taught in many American and English universities," the Irish Times reports. More from there:

Murphy, who was born in at Milford House, near Shrule on the Mayo-Galway border, into an Anglo-Irish family, in 1927, a distant descendant of both Charles I of England and Patrick Sarsfield, devoted his life to a poetry that sought to reconcile Ireland’s and his own two traditions.

The Battle of Aughrim (1968), perhaps his most famous work, originally commissioned for radio by the BBC, had as its central theme the bridging of Ireland’s two cultures. The title poem is a long narrative about the decisive Protestant victory over Catholic forces in 1691. His ancestors had fought on opposite sides and Murphy declared, “My underlying wish was to unite my divided self, as a renegade from a family of Protestant imperialists, in our divided country in a sequence faithful to the disunity of both. The poetry was to occupy a no man’s land between music, myth and history.”

Ireland's president Michael D. Higgins is one of many to pay tribute. "I had the privilege of speaking of his work and our meetings when he visited Galway. While The Battle of Aughrim (1968) made him famous, Sailing To An Island (1963) is one of the finest expositions of life, craft and the elements as they engage with the sea," he writes. More from there: 

He had a great reading voice and was the second poet to be chosen, after Dylan Thomas, when the BBC first began to broadcast poetry read by living poets.

To his daughter Emily and son William and his many friends may I express the sorrow so many will feel at his passing. It is a sorrow that will be shared by those in Omey island, Cleggan and Sri Lanka.

Thomas McCarthy
He was one of the last of the great Olympian generation of postwar Irish poets, one of the original Dolmen Press poets of the early 1950s. He had, as Ted Hughes wrote of him “the gift of epic objectivity: beyond his poems we feel not the assertion of his personality, but the actuality of events, the facts and the suffering of history”. He was uniquely Anglo-Irish and proud of that double heritage. He owned and sailed an old Galway fishing-boat boat, The Ave Maria, built houses with his own hands and yet began his life, after Wellington College and Magdalen, Oxford, as a bowler-hatted clerk at Lloyds of London. 

Read the full obituary at the Irish Times, along with a series of tributes and remembrances. Finally, head here to browse Murphy's contributions to Poetry.