First, a confession. In 1998, after the release of, my musical settings of WB Yeats that had been praised in Ireland, I was invited to stay with Maura McTighe, the president of the Yeats Society in Sligo. When I arrived, Maura gave me the run-down of what we’d be doing while I was there, which included her arranging for me to “go down and see Seamus”.
This was also the case for contemporaries such as John McGahern, John Montague and Seamus Deane, members of a coterie of writers that appear in these letters not in their own words, but as familiar figures of Heaney’s people-teeming world. The flak he received was considerable, but his own personal anxieties notwithstanding, such lucidities as he had access to always seemed to measure up via a deeply human logic. And, as the flashpoints of the Troubles attenuated themselves through the ’80s and ’90s, Heaney, now living in Dublin and teaching at Harvard for nearly half of every year, developed into a unifying figure.