‘Every poet should aspire to be like him’

It is simply unbelievable that Seamus Heaney is dead. It is astonishing and it must be untrue; untrue in the deepest, most immortal sense of that word.

My generation was born to poetry under his rising star. We watched in wonder as his star became fixed above the planet of poets. We were amazed at the sureness of his touch on the gears of an Ulster talent that kept him aloft, like a rescue helicopter hovering majestically over the battlefields of world poetry. Sometimes he landed in our patch of the field, distributing the medicine of his words, before flying away again. He was kind and generous, big-hearted but capable of severity. For a portion of each year he suffered fools gladly, but always sidled away graciously, never giving offence, but determined to save himself. From the beginning he knew the price of fame and he was always willing to pay its full tribute of endless prefaces, epitaphs, openings and introductions. His heart was literally shredded in the insatiable mire of his admirers, admirers that included me and a thousand other poets.

Seamus was generous to a fault, with a generous farming instinct that owed so much to his family and his townland of Mossbawn, Co Derry. Born into a farming society that knew everything of the meitheal and the Co-Op, he was at ease with everyone through his entire life. He loved to tell the story of his time eating in a restaurant with his extended family in the weeks after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature: how the locals didn’t bother him, leaving him alone with his siblings to eat and talk: but now and again they would pass by his table to squeeze his arm or shoulder, muttering ‘Well done,’ ‘good, man, good man,’ as if he’d scored the winning point in a County Final. In that country restaurant he could sense the community pride in the air, a sense of pride that was, for him, simply golden because it was local. He was a highly-educated, scholarly man, a teacher at Queens University and Carysfort College and, later, Boylston Professor at Harvard; but in his scholarship he wished to exclude nobody. Inclusiveness was his deepest, democratic instinct. In this, he was most like those other greats, Peadar O’Donnell and John McGahern.