When Kay Redfield Jamison was 17 and experiencing her first mental breakdown, her English teacher gave her two of Robert Lowell’s poems to read – The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket and Mr Edwards and the Spider.

While the staff of the Irish Examiner wishes to join with the family of Seamus Heaney in mourning his passing, it is also important that he should be celebrated as one of the world’s greatest men of letters.

Irish Nobel prize winning poet Seamus Heaney is to donate thousands of literary papers and letters to an American university.