Famous

The Heaney Letters flow on by, either repetitively or with recurrent leitmotifs.

He became his own industry which is a mark of his enormous success and I daresay he wouldn't have had it any differently but such celebrity comes at a cost. Whereas by now 'celebrities' are celebrated for being celebrities and that will do, it was previously required that they were celebrated for something. Heaney spends so much of his time travelling the world that editor, Christopher Reid, remarks that he might have had special notepaper printed with EI 117, the flight out of Dublin, as his address. In receipt of 15 letters a day, it's not in his nature to become tetchy about it but reading this book revises one's picture of him away from rural Ulster, the culture of Irish legends or peat bogs to that of airports, commitments, engagements, trying to avoid commodification and ever belately keeping up with correspondance. He does it all with good grace as best he can but not all of us would envy the schedule of lectures, readings, the Oxford job, Harvard, the craic that he maintains a devotion to, the books to write, read and know about while still ostensibly needing the time for reflection required to produce his poems.

Perhaps in some way he did become the factory of the product that his own industry depended on. There have been some who found fault with what he did but surely there are always those who take exception to success. 

I won't hear of it although I might not have taken on quite so many projects myself.

I've never been entirely sure about the debt he owed to Ted Hughes. Hughes, born in 1930, is as much of Heaney's generation, born 1939, as he is of the one before. It's more usual for one's main role model to come from an age difference more like that of Hardy, whose poems began circa 1900, and Larkin, born in 1922, but there are no rules- as ever- about such things.

But Heaney explicitly acknowledges Hughes in birthday wishes in 1990,

the verifying and releasing power 'Lupercal' et al had on me in 1962. 

And you can't say fairer than that however many parallels one wants to find between the nature, the violence and the deep sense of history. One might say the language and music, too, but that might be where any such essay comparison needed to do a bit more work than outline the obvious. Hughes, some might suspect, seems to relish the vigour and alpha-male aspects of nature and appears to be lone, selfish and destructive whereas Heaney is communal and gentler.

There's an essay in it but it's not one I'd attempt. They are neither of them ironic enough but Heaney is the much better poet. He may well have found things in Hughes that he could develop towards his own purposes. You feel you're in good company with Heaney, in safe hands. You don't always think so with Ted.