Seamus Heaney’s Ireland

Seamus Heaney's Ireland

Seamus Heaney by Ross Wilson, 1994

A year on from the death of a universally loved yet once controversial poet

ROY FOSTER

Ideas and images which have to be understood and loved by large numbers of people, must appeal to no rich personal experience, no patience of study, no delicacy of sense . . . . Manner and matter will be rhetorical, conventional, sentimental; and language, because it is carried beyond life perpetually, will be as wasted as the thought, with unmeaning pedantries and silences, and a dread of all that has salt and savour. After a while, in a land that has given itself to agitation over-much, abstract thoughts are raised up between men's minds and Nature, who never does the same thing twice, or makes one man like another, till minds, whose patriotism is perhaps great enough to carry them to the scaffold, cry down natural impulse with the morbid persistence of minds unsettled by some fixed idea . . . while a secret feeling that what is so unreal needs continual defence makes them bitter and restless . . . . Even if what one defends be true, an attitude of defence, a continual apology, whatever the cause makes the mind barren because it kills intellectual innocence; that delight in what is unforeseen, and in the mere spectacle of the world, the mere drifting hither and thither that must come before all true thought and emotion.

W . B. Yeats's essay "J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time" was written over the summer of 1910, after Synge's death, and is Yeats's meditation on how the artist retains intellectual independence in the face of a tide of popular sentiment that tries to carry him or her elsewhere; and how the pressures of "abstract" feelings need to be combated. He wrote much of it while staying with Maud Gonne in Normandy, and she appears between the lines: as where he reflects, later in the essay, that the "continual defence" of political propriety can make a whole generation "like an hysterical woman who will make unmeasured accusations and believe impossible things, because of some logical deduction from a solitary thought which has turned a portion of her mind to stone". In a less prejudiced way, and more importantly, Yeats's great essay is also a meditation on the way that a writer reflects and reacts to the political and social context of his or her times, retaining integrity while responding to the flux of contemporary history. At the same time, the injunction is clear: the writer must also guard against "unmeaning pedantries and silences", seeking and preserving the necessary "salt and savour" in language and finding an anchorage in "rich personal experience, patience of study, and delicacy of sense".

It requires no great effort to transfer thoughts to another great writer whose relationship to "the Ireland of his time" was central to his work and his impact – but who combated the pressures to conform, or to write to order, with a characteristic mixture of grace and inflexibility. Seamus Heaney's work contributed to the Ireland of his time, and – I would argue – in many ways reflected the changes in both Irelands, from his first publications in the early 1960s, until his death one year ago this week, at the age of seventy-four. Yeats, who died at seventy-three, and Synge (thirty-eight) both sustained a more obviously combative relationship to the Ireland of their day, and a sulphurous whiff of controversy still hung around them at the time of their death. The extraordinary, uplifting and somehow consoling outburst of national mourning that occurred after Heaney's death reflected something different: not only the fact that he had – as he himself said of Yeats – achieved authority within a culture, but also the fact that his work had entered the language and given cause for pride. I use the word advisedly, because here, too, there is a Yeatsian echo, when we remember Yeats's response to a question addressed to him in 1926, after the riots over Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars. The question concerned Irish sensitivity to "the faults of a country being exposed". Yeats's reply was that a country which had reached intellectual maturity became proud rather than vain – the difference being that vanity meant wanting other people to think well of you because you didn't believe in yourself, whereas pride meant "indifference as to whether people were shown in a good or bad light on the stage; as a nation came to intellectual maturity it realised that the only thing that did it any credit was its intellect".

Ireland – meaning Irish intellectual as well as social and economic life – went through changes from the late 1950s which involved (sometimes traumatically) leaving behind self-sustaining vanity and slowly achieving some kind of pride. There are ways in which Heaney's work not only kept pace with, but kept faith with, those changes. In a real sense, Heaney had become the national poet; but he had achieved this authority through the kind of watchful independence expressed by the personae in so many of his poems, as well as the lacerating insights which made his work so unmistakable and, on occasion, scarifying.

These same qualities enabled him to overcome something else that is evoked in Yeats's essay on Synge: the kind of criticism, much more evident in Heaney's early than in his later career, which arraigned him for not writing as others thought he should. Many of these critiques are now forgotten, and several of his critics tended to self-destruct – either through pretentiousness, obscurantism, vindictiveness, or the envy of the second-rate. The titles alone of some of these essays are enough: expressing faux-bonhomie, as in "The Trouble With Seamus", or self-righteously turning a Heaney phrase back on himself, as in "Pap for the Dispossessed", and so on. More importantly, several of these early critiques were grounded in a very prescriptive idea, not only of the poet's role in general, but of the poet's duty to the Ireland of his time – most particularly and pompously in an essay by Desmond Fennell, which demonstrated exactly the difference Yeats pinpointed between national "vanity" and national "pride".

This kind of critique is different from, say, the absorbing interview with Seamus Deane in Crane Bag in 1977, where two old friends engage in a fencing match or an aggressive game of chess; or the adversarial analysis of Edna Longley, or the surprisingly sharp response of Ciaran Carson. Significantly, these more considered reactions were essentially occasioned by the collection North (1975), a landmark in many ways. Up to then, Heaney remarked, all his books were in a way "one book": this was a departure. The way in which it was seen to be a departure, however, depended on where you were standing. Helen Vendler, a close reader early on, judged it one of the most important single volumes of poetry since T. S. Eliot'sPrufrock and Other Observations (1917); critics north of the Irish border reacted differently. The uncompromising clarity, the blunt power of the imagery that juxtaposed Iron Age sacrificial victims preserved in the Jutland bog with the violent outrages of killings in Northern Ireland were taken as an offensive celebration of "noble barbarity", from someone becoming dangerously like a "laureate of violence" (Ciaran Carson, in Honest Ulsterman); the introspection of a poem such as "Exposure", which ends the book, was attacked from another angle.

Heaney would later defend the "right to life" of the poems in North, and also their oblique way of addressing the situation in Northern Ireland. He referred to them as "grimly executed" and described them as "odd and hard and contrary"; in conversations with Dennis O'Driscoll he repeatedly uses the metaphor of "clinker" for these poems – the irreducible desposit left after a fire in a range (or a furnace). The reaction in the Republic was different again. Without going as far as Ciaran Carson, the themes of violence and atavism came sharply though; and it is the violence of the imagery which Fintan O'Toole, for example, emphasized in retrospect, in a fascinating article on Heaney's work written twenty-four years later, from the vantage of 1999. But the sense of a breakthrough was inescapable, and of the poet as observer and interpreter not only of his times, but of "time" reaching back into an immemorial past. The concepts of tribes and atavism hung uneasily in the ether.

North placed the poet in the conning-tower (the kind of image which would recur in Heaney's poetry, along with look-outs, spies, reconnaissance men) but also – famously – interrogated the role of observer. Observer, not actor. "My temper", Heaney once remarked, "is not Brechtian." Didacticism was foreign to him, and time and again he discussed and evaluated his own evasiveness, along with the sense of alertness to sectarian strains and slights which he saw as coming from his mother's side (the cattle trade, he once remarked, conferred on his father a "trans-sectarian right to roam"). But he firmly rejected more comforting and comfortable commentary on Ulster peculiarities such as, perhaps, the BBC views voiced by Sam Hanna Bell and John Boyd in the 1950s and early 60s: what Brian Friel called "the wholesome Ambridge-like Ulster the BBC (NI) would have us believe". Heaney knew Northern Ireland was not a "good wee place". He had after all to go to the "man-killing" fields of Jutland to feel "lost, / Unhappy, and at home".

How important, in this context, is it that North was written in the South? Heaney wrote often of the sanctuary of the cottage at Glanmore in Co Wicklow that he and his family rented and later bought: a tranquil space for writing, but also a refuge from war. It was also, just as importantly, an escape from the network of attitudes and prejudices that Heaney eviscerated in several poems, and talked of in many interviews. His language in describing the warp and weft of sectarianism and discrimination is interesting: the adjective that recurs (especially in the interviews with Dennis O'Driscoll in Stepping Stones, 2008) is "noxious" and the idea of a poisonous miasma persists. At the same time Heaney's own direct experience is often different: relations with his Protestant neighbours while he was growing up are warmly evoked in Stepping Stones, and delicately portrayed in poems such as "The Other Side"; when he recalls his life at Queen's University Belfast, both as student and lecturer, the emphasis falls on interaction rather than separation – among the Honours students of English, he said, there was "a certain breeziness of style in handling all the noxious stuff" amid a clearly divided and stratified society. And he was always decisively clear that the reflections of social relationships in his poetry were

not intended as a contribution to better community relations; [that poetry] had come out of creative freedom rather than social obligation – it was about a moment of achieved grace between people with different allegiances rather than a representation of a state of constant goodwill in the country as a whole, and as such it was not presuming to be anything more than a momentary stay against confusion

– a phrase from Robert Frost, which Heaney uses more than once.

The move south, after teaching schoolchildren in Ballymurphy and university students in Queen's, is still decisively important; it lay behind the expansiveness that characterized Heaney's development from the late 1970s, and the way that this reflected an expansion and change in Irish society as a whole: hard-won, not always obvious at the time, but, in John Montague's words, old moulds were being broken. The hallmarks of the Heaney style were established early on, from his very first collection: what has been called the "axiomatic rightness" of words and phrases in poems which often ended with a Yeatsian flourish, and what Heaney himself, early in his career, described as the poet's business: "the summoning and meshing of the subconscious and semantic energies of words". But what accompanies this, as the volumes – which like Yeats's were "books" rather than "collections" – succeed each other, is a widening of horizons, reflecting not just the sojourns in Harvard or the "silence, exile and sunning", as Heaney put it, at Berkeley. The importance to him of Eastern European writers – Osip Mandelstam, Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, Joseph Brodsky – is equally striking, and shows the extension of a poetic authority which is also a preoccupation with how poets should live in their times, especially when those times are out of joint. In his introduction to The Government of the Tongue (1988), he makes an Irish parallel explicit:

I keep returning to [Mandelstam and other poets from eastern bloc countries] because there is something in their situation that makes them attractive to a reader whose formative experience has been largely Irish. There is an unsettled aspect to the different worlds they inhabit, and one of the challenges they face is to survive amphibiously, in the realm of "the times" and the realm of their moral and artistic self-respect, a challenge immediately recognizable to anyone who has lived with the awful and demeaning facts of Northern Ireland's history over the last couple of decades.

This was written in 1987. The next "couple of decades" would see, not only upheavals, liberations and unsettlements in those very Eastern bloc countries, but also tectonic shifts in Ireland, North and South. And it would become, perhaps, clearer that however out of joint the Irish times had been, an Irish poet had not witnessed what Mandelstam, or Miłosz, or the Jewish Hungarian poet Milos Radnoti had had to witness. In a deeply absorbing lecture on human rights and the artist, which Heaney delivered to the Law Society in 2012, he wrote of Radnoti's terrible fate under the Nazis, stumbling to his death on a forced march, before being shot and dumped in a pit; but all the time keeping a tiny notebook in which he inscribed defiant poems. The notebook was exhumed with his body from a mass grave, a testament in the literature of "witnessing", that theme to which Heaney turned again and again.

The world of suffering that writers in Central and Eastern Europe witnessed in the twentieth century might put Irish local difficulties in perspective, but observing them can lend an edge to one's own observations. Heaney's own commitment, as his work accumulated into an oeuvre, and times changed around him, remained determinedly un-simplifying in terms of possible parallels and echoes between Ireland and elsewhere. He himself was – it seemed, effortlessly – cosmopolitan, in the best sense of that awkward word. To Yeats's generation, the word suggested a debasement and dilution of properly autochthonous national cultures ("Antaeus-like"): to us, though, Yeats seems a model of cosmopolitanism, with his interests in Italian philosophy, Japanese theatre and Indian religion, his life spent between Ireland and England, his determination that Irish culture would look to the best international models. Heaney's cosmpolitanism was of a similar order – perhaps taking on as well something of that "rooted cosmopolitanism" advocated by Kwame Anthony Appiah, as a way of negotiating civic identity in a society with a history of internal divisions. The original sin of sacral nationalism, however, will keep bursting through such achieved or contrived polities, a fact of which Heaney was always aware. (Sarajevo, after all, was once one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe.) Heaney's classical education also became a more obviously sustaining inspiration in these years, a source of passion that would last to the end: the classical myths, stories and concepts that inform so much of his later work served as another route out of Irish exceptionalism.

A further, vital aspect of the expansion, interrogation and inclusiveness that mark Heaney's maturity is also his celebration and possession of the inheritance of English poetry. This is elegantly gestured at throughout the "Glanmore Sonnets", and fires his readings of Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill and Philip Larkin in his essay "Englands of the Mind". The solidity of the English tradition was something he rested on, and what it meant to him is unequivocally demonstrated in his lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry, published in The Redress of Poetry, as well as the pieces in The Government of the Tongue and a great wealth of essays and lectures that remain uncollected. But as he repeatedly said, this saturation is completely consistent with his self-identification as an Irish, not a British, poet.

In "J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time", Yeats remarked that the "casuistry" of political correctness (as he didn't call it) tends in Ireland to put a barrier, or "meshes" (a word Heaney loved too), between Irish readers and English literature, "substituting arguments and hesitations for the excitement at the first reading of the great poets which should be a sort of violent imaginative puberty". It is exactly that excitement and engagement which Heaney celebrated and conveyed when he wrote and lectured about John Clare, Wordsworth, Hardy, and others: claiming a "double inheritance" which came to him easily as to no other contemporary Irish poet. As he reflected at the end of those Oxford lectures:

There is nothing extraordinary about the challenge to be in two minds. If, for example, there was something exacerbating, there was still nothing deleterious to my sense of Irishness in the fact that I grew up in the minority in Northern Ireland and was educated within the dominant British culture. My identity was emphasized rather than eroded by being maintained in such circumstances. The British dimension, in other words, while it is something that will be resisted by the minority if it is felt to be coercive, has nevertheless been a given of our history and even of our geography, one of the places where we all live, willy-nilly. It's in the language. And it's where the mind of many in the republic lives also. So I would suggest that the majority in Northern Ireland should make a corresponding effort at two-mindedness and start to conceive of themselves within – rather than beyond – the Irish element. Obviously, it will be extremely difficult for them to surmount their revulsion against all the violence that has been perpetrated in the name of Ireland, but everything and everybody would be helped were they to make their imagination press back against the pressure of reality . . . . Within our individual selves we can reconcile two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic . . . each form of knowledge redresses the other and . . . the frontier between them is there for the crossing.

This was prescient, in November 1993, just one month before the announcement of a new approach to multiple political identities taken by the Downing Street Declaration made by John Major and Albert Reynolds. In declaring that Britain had no selfish strategic interest in Northern Ireland, that the people of Northern Ireland had the right to decide on Union with Britain or unity with the Republic by mutual consent, and that a united Ireland could come about only by peaceful means, that Declaration allowed discourse to move on from the parameters prescribed by the Government of Ireland Act 1920 and the claims of the Republic under Articles 2 and 3 of its Constitution. The Good Friday Agreement would follow on from that. And here, too, I think Heaney was reflecting the Ireland of his time – a Republic which had moved from the introspection of the early 1960s through the dislocations and challenges of the 70s, through the cautious rethinking of attitudes to nationalism and unionism which progressed haltingly from the 1980s, and led to the reconfigurations of national and cross-channel relationships expressed by the ceasefires, framework documents and eventually agreements of the late 1990s. In those same years the North had lurched through the cycles of violence and trauma that so powerfully inflected Heaney's poetry, before coming to some kind of cautious moment of reassessment, which Heaney gestured towards in some key poems, as well as his play The Cure at Troy. Anchored as he was in his native ground, this sensitivity to a change in the weather never left him. Nor was he Pollyannaish about the extent to which sectarian division had become further entrenched during the Troubles, and was in some ways reluctantly underwritten by the "peace process" – along with some cutting of corners and double-think which may be causing problems now.

Heaney also expressed the sense that things need not ineluctably have reached the pitch they did; interestingly, in remembering the early 1960s in Stepping Stones, he anticipates the conclusions of some recent studies of the Troubles, that there was a feeling in the early 1960s that discrimination and inequality could and would be addressed, that a new dispensation was possible, that change was beckoning. And that the thirty years and 3,000 deaths that followed might be seen, not as the inevitable bursting of a long-anticipated storm, but as the advent of a malign tornado. These thoughts recur, and so did his examination of the peculiar institutions and attitudes of "the province". They were long-rooted. "Whatever You Say, Say Nothing", published in North and almost instantly reckoned canonical, had first appeared in the Listener in 1971, and in fact arose from verse letters written by Heaney to his friends. The injunction in the title was, nonetheless, as Heaney later clarified, "ironical rather than instructional; it was fundamentally an expression of anger rather than acquiescence". The fact that he felt this needed saying surely reflected the changed and relaxed circumstances of the early 2000s, when he was recording his interviews with Dennis O'Driscoll; back in the early 1970s, the anger blazed off the page. It's of a piece with what he called – in that 1977 interview with Seamus Deane – "the slightly aggravated young Catholic male" side of his contemporary persona. Certainly, a rage against what he called "the bankrupt psychology and mythologies implicit in the terms Irish Catholic and Ulster Protestant" remained, and grew; along with an enduring sense of linkage and mirror-imaging.

From 1972, Heaney's vantage was Wicklow and then Dublin, viewing the North from what Tom Paulin has called the "corrupt civility" of the Republic. But he also viewed the history of his times from a broader vantage still: "The Frontier of Writing". The ambition, range and sheer power of his writing benefited from displacement; a realization that came powerfully home to me when I read Station Island (1984), to me one of Heaney's supreme achievements and a key work – above all in the title poem, fusing ghosts, history and accusation. Reading it, Yeats's poem "Parnell's Funeral" came irresistibly to mind.

Come, fix upon me that accusing eye.
I thirst for accusation. All that was sung,
All that was said in Ireland is a lie
Bred out of the contagion of the throng,
Saving the rhyme that rats hear before they die.
Leave nothing but the nothings that belong
To this bare soul, let all men judge that can
Whether it be an animal or a man.

"Station Island" does not share this contemptuous tone, but it is full of contained anger nonetheless. Its sometimes jagged interrogations are expressed in many voices – the legendary Irish king Sweeny's, William Carleton's, mentors of the poet's youth, victims of sectarian killings, and finally James Joyce's. The visionary framework contains and expands longstanding preoccupations: the Dantean journey among the dead, the inheritance of Catholicism, the responsibilities of the poet in the world and his obligation to those who have gone before. This sense of writing as a negotiation with the dead, an act of revivification and questioning and retrieval, is a powerful theme in the poetry that Heaney identified with and referred to; after all, the ur-poet is Orpheus, and Rilke's Orpheus sonnets, retracing the poet's famous journey to the shades, may be much in Heaney's mind here. (Remember, too, his wonderful love poem, "The Underground".) But "Station Island" is also about the poet's duty to himself, expressed viscerally in the advice meted out by the poet's last interlocutor, James Joyce, in his voice "like a prosecutor's or a singer's, / Cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite". Joyce tells the poet to stay at a tangent, fly by the nets, claim the English language, stop raking at dead fires.

It is a Yeatsian injunction, though Yeats would not have been a likely denizen of Station Island, and he is not to be met there. But the themes focused in this powerful poem (a work that divides the critics) seem quintessentially Yeatsian in the end. Heaney wrote a celebrated essay called "Yeats as an Example?" with a question mark conveying an arched eyebrow and an ironic smile. (Even before Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize, the comparisons were mounting, and one of the most splenetic reactions from an early critic came when Clive James remarked "Sooner or later people are going to start comparing [Heaney] to Yeats".) In the essay Heaney sets down what Yeats means to a working poet:

What Yeats offers the practising writer is an example of labour, perseverance. He is, indeed, the ideal example for a poet approaching middle age. He reminds you that revision and slog-work are what you may have to undergo if you seek the satisfaction of finish; he bothers you with the suggestion that if you have managed to do one kind of poem in your own way, you should cast off that way and face into another area of your experience until you have learned a new voice to say that area properly. He encourages you to experience a transference of energies from poetic forms themselves, reveals how the challenge of a metre can extend the resources of the voice. He proves that deliberation can be so intensified that it becomes synonymous with inspiration. Above all he reminds you that art is intended, that it is part of the creative push of civilization itself.

This is personal, practical, nuts-and-bolts stuff; it deliberately avoids the extent to which Yeats was presented with the role of Ireland's public poet, even national poet – and took ingenious pains to subvert and evade the restrictions and banalities that too readily come with such a role. Here, surely, was another arena in which Heaney learned from "Yeats as an example": the sense of an impact on their times, the danger of becoming a "smiling public man"', and the necessity to distance yourself. Heaney gets closer to the assonances between life and work in their two lives when he referred to the lesson that Yeats learned from living in interesting times – "that you deal with public crisis, not by accepting the terms of the public's crisis, but by making your own imagery and your own terrain take the colour of it, take the impression of it". This is exactly what Yeats does in, for example, "Meditations in Time of Civil War", a sequence Heaney invokes more than once, and to which his own poetry owes an obvious debt. Clearly he absorbed the uncompromising directness and minute observation of "The Road at my Door" and "The Stare's Nest at my Window", but he also identifies with Yeats's self-questioning conclusion to "I see Phantoms of Hatred . . . ":

I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair
Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth
In something that all others understand and share;
But O! ambitious heart, had such a proof drawn forth
A company of friends, a conscience set at ease,
It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy,
The half-read wisdom of daemonic images,
Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.

And to read Heaney, the prose and the interviews but above all the collections of poems as they succeed each other, is to acquire a sense of the growth of the poet: as with Yeats, or with Wordsworth's Prelude. "In certain great poets", Heaney said, "Yeats, Shakespeare, Stevens, Miłosz – you sense an ongoing opening of consciousness as they age, a deepening and clarifying and even simplifying of receptivity to what might be waiting on the farther shore. It's like one of those rare summer evenings when the sky clears rather than darkens."

More sombrely, the late work of both Yeats and Heaney is preoccupied with death. In "Yeats as an Example", Heaney puts as Yeats's final lesson to other writers his "large-minded, whole-hearted assent to the natural cycles of living and dying . . . the humility of his artistic mastery before the mystery of life and death". Both suffered dangerous illnesses in their last years, which conferred a sense that their time might not be long; both were haunted by ghosts, and possessed by the plangent and marvellous images of visits to the underworld which permeate classical literature, and were mediated for both men by Dante. For Heaney – and it's another of those dimensions of Englishness, perhaps – there are connections to the actual passages and tunnels of the London Underground railway system, which recur in his work; more profoundly and directly, there is his preoccupation with Yeats's deathbed poem, "Cuchulain Comforted" , invoked more than once in his own work, and presenting a "passport" across the Styx. Even as early as his Oxford lectures we hear this note, when Heaney celebrates the magnificent response to a self-questioning old age delineated in Yeats's "The Man and the Echo", posited against Philip Larkin's "Aubade".

In Heaney's own last poems there is a note of transcendence, and of traffic with the dead – with which his last collection, Human Chain, so eerily begins. These late preoccupations first become obvious, perhaps, in Seeing Things (1991), with its theme of transparency. It is also the culmination of what he expressed earlier as a desire for "plain, clear glass", striven for from his forties, rather than decoration and colour. He achieved it. But in remembering his wonderful technique, and the way his work lifts into transcendence, we should also remember that what he admired in Dante was an ability to handle both the transcendent and the political. In terms of the Ireland of his time, this meant coping with "the typical strains which the consciousness labours under in this country . . . to be faithful to the collective historical experience and to be true to the recognition of the emerging self" (Yeats again). The way Heaney balanced these makes him a uniquely interesting poet, as well as a great one; it also aroused fierce reactions, especially early in his career, which gained momentum against the background of troubled times.

Heaney died universally admired and mourned. Still, it is worth remembering, first, that he was at times controversial; second, the reasons why he was controversial; and third, the reasons why the controversy dissipated and was replaced by the affirmative and acclaimed role which he occupied in national life, so overwhelmingly demonstrated at the time of his death. His work will survive him, and all such controversy, most of all because it achieves what Eugenio Montale said poetry must do: "mak[e] an obscure pilgrimage through conscience and memory", eventually flowing back into the life of "everyday circulation", from which it took its first nourishment and inspiration. It kept faith with conscience and memory, and repudiated – as Yeats advised in his Synge essay – the pressure to be abstractly "rhetorical, conventional and sentimental". That is why the poetry of Seamus Heaney will remain a vital and enduring testament to the Ireland of his time.

*

This is the edited text of a lecture delivered at a Commemoration and Celebration of Seamus Heaney held at Magdalene College, Cambridge, on March 4, 2014.