The Heaney Letters, to finish

Probably more to be enjoyed as it went on, the names and events more familiar in the 1990's and thereabouts which increasingly looks like a minor Golden Age. It is, like such books often are, like a biography, like the one he turned down offers for more than once. He thought that the interviews in Stepping Stones adequately covered that ground and that he'd revealed enough. But, as with Larkin and anybody else who wants to defend their privacy, such intrusions are an inevitable corollary of celebrity although perhaps one that you don't see coming until it's too late.

But in 2010 he suffers a 'heavy depression'. Without wanting to diagnose the causes of that, one might wonder how it happened to such a naturally cheery, convivial man of such depth and balance. He'd had a stroke, he was 70, thoughts of mortality might have pressed more imminiently upon him and even the happiest of souls can discover a darker side. But I just wonder if, after such a life immersed in the 'word-hoard', complying with so many requests for appearances, contributions and lectures, the time spent on flights to all parts of the world and overseeing a whole academic industry of which he was the focal point - if he just began to question the worth of it all.

In so many of the letters he thanks people for their books and says generous things about how enriching they were but you can do so much, so apparently tirelessly and sincerely, and yet - perhaps one wonders what it amounts to.

It's the template for so many life stories - origins, the early successes, a sort of seamless transition into being the person they became known as, the superstar years (where applicable) but eventually the decline, the health issues and the looking back. The 'looking back' for Heaney being in his two last books of poems that refer to earlier ideas that made his name.

It's a big book and something of an undertaking, obviously essential to any Heaney scholar and of interest to many beyond them. Like any such thing it can be dipped into but I don't generally dip into books, I either read them or I don't. It is the broad sweep and the accumulating detail that gathers together the Heaney story and it's best read whole if at all..

He's not a Top 6 poet for me, probably not even Top 12. He possibly ought to be, given the 'poetry' and the music in it and all those things that make a poet great. So he could be in 'Best 12', certainly Best Handful of C20th in the Language but I don't feel he's my man. It's probably due to the Irishness, which is a fine flavour but not something I feel a part of.

It's the difference between 'favourite' and 'best' and also something to do with disposition. I am ill at ease sometimes, perhaps being shown up by the benevolence that makes him seem almost a candidate for beatification compared to the more guarded compromises some of us find it necessary to make in life and writing. I was once surprised by the results of an academic survey of coverage of the poets of the period in journals, magazines, etc. that put Heaney ahead of Hughes in such perceived 'importance', at no. 1. I'm sure that's how it should have been. Heaney had a lot of time for Hughes, to be sure, and owed an early debt to his example in poetry but he readily came clear of any such dependance and became much more.