There are a couple of ways to read The Letters of Seamus Heaney (2024). In one sense, they are formidable examples of one poet’s unremitting life of public and private good works and of a literary citizen whose output made far-reaching ripples from his initial small pond. But the letters can also be read as a parable on the dangers of fame. When Heaney died in 2013, he was Ireland’s national poet and the country’s second Nobel laureate. Such was his fame by then that his final texted words, “Noli timere” (Be not afraid), from the Vulgate translation of Matthew 14:27, went into immediate circulation. They became a neon-lit sign on a Seamus Heaney museum and instantly entered into English usage to the degree that the quote is often associated more with Heaney than with the original citation of the Gospel.

The letters chronicle the social engagements with increasing numbers of people that intensified throughout his life. Only one letter (to his schoolmate Seamus Deane) predates Heaney’s correspondence with Charles Monteith at publisher Faber & Faber, and that first letter announces his engagement to Marie Devlin. (“We are very happy and believe that we can remain so for a lifetime.”) Both alliances, with publisher and with eloquent spouse, were to last until that final text from the hospital, and references to what Devlin or Faber were thinking or doing for the poet’s benefit form the spine of this journey from obscurity to individual-engulfing fame. The title of this review is a quote recorded by Heaney’s sometime poetry editor and now letter chronicler Christopher Reid, whose notes on the letters of 1996 state that this was what “Marie Heaney is reported to have said, and SH himself had to come to terms with its consequences for him, both in the wider world and closer to home.” The conflict between fame and private life, the tension between the preservation of the inner life that emits the poetry and the public life that elicits the reading and buying of that poetry, the ripples from the outside that touch the inner person and ripples of the inner person that affect everyone around him, all these are the themes of the book.

Over the years, I’ve had my own encounters with Heaney and those connected to him. I first met a living poet when I went to university – Paul Muldoon, a former student of Heaney’s. I then saw Heaney read at that university and remembered his reading, both what he said and the poems he read, many years later when I first encountered his translation of Beowulf. I went to Boston to study with Derek Walcott, a friend of Heaney’s. I won a residency at a writer’s retreat where I met Tom Sleigh (a former colleague of Heaney’s who, like many others, continued sending Heaney his books for years and seeking Heaney’s encouragement). I moved back to London and met Ted Hughes (Heaney’s frequent collaborator and correspondent) at a poetry reading. I moved to Israel and met a former student of Joseph Brodsky (a friend of Heaney’s). I returned to England and moved to a little town in Yorkshire overpopulated with poets. My next-door neighbor was doing a PhD in creative writing, and her external examiner was Vona Groarke (whose letters show her to be another friend of Heaney’s). I even met Heaney once outside an Irish bar, The Plough and Stars, in Cambridge. But even if I were not in the poetry world, I would have stumbled across friends of Heaney anywhere in the English-speaking world. He was, as the jacket copy argues, “the leading poet of his generation.”

Heaney’s life was split (at turns cleanly or raggedly) between a rural Wicklow cottage and a life of publishing and lecturing. The cottage was offered at nominal rent by an academic colleague (one of many kindnesses he seemed to elicit wherever he turned), and at this haven he found the silence to write poems and eventually letters. The rest of his time was spent in London, Oxford, Stockholm, Japan, and, most profitably and frequently, at Harvard. He gave poetry readings all across the United States, plowing the airways much as his father had plowed a field. If I had a pound for every time Heaney starts a letter with the question “Why don’t I come here [to Wicklow] more often?” I could pay for the hardback edition of this book at £40. If I had a pound for every time he alludes to Philip Larkin’s line, “Something is pushing them to the sides of their own lives” (from “Afternoons” 1959), I would have enough to buy it twice in the paperback now issued at £16.99. Larkin was speaking of death, perhaps, but Heaney was speaking of fame. As early as the 1980s, there is a letter from an airport lounge in which a spiritually and emotionally strip-mined Heaney memorably describes himself as “a schedule-haunted man,” running from one teaching, lecturing, or reading engagement to another.

Students whom Edward O’Shea interviewed for his study of Heaney’s US career, Seamus Heaney’s American Odyssey (2022), got used to seeing a flustered Heaney arrive for a lecture having come straight from the airport and a recent reading. O’Shea traces the web of academic and Irish influence in America that paved Heaney’s way: from an initial one-year visit to Berkeley, to the Michigan Poetry Circuit of eighteen readings in two weeks, to a spring semester appointment at Harvard, to being invited to succeed Elizabeth Bishop at her permanent post at Harvard, to achieving ever more illustrious chairs at Harvard, and eventually retiring when struck by the “avalanche that is almost entirely benign,” as Heaney called it in a letter, referring to that Nobel Prize.

O’Shea acutely parses the drafts of Heaney’s poems from notebooks at various libraries, comparing them to published versions in magazines, broadsheets, and poetry collections and reflecting on the impulses that made Heaney tone down an initially overt political reference or shy away from a personal revelation in a first draft. Heaney’s lecture and later essay on Elizabeth Bishop notes that she would make an initial observation and then return to it over and over, at each successive pass overcoming her innate aversion to self-revelation only to finally bare her emotion. O’Shea’s labors reveal that Heaney’s practice was the exact opposite. He often began with a self-exposing memory or private detail that would later be obscured in the revision, as the political instincts of the “smiling public man” he often cited from Yeats and the “cautious wee Papist,” as he signed off in one of his letters, took their toll on his impulse to confess.

To get away from all that, Heaney would escape to Wicklow, and his life ticked along so long as he was able to protect the one life from the predations of the other. At times, though, his inner life became entirely subsumed or depleted (in his own estimation) by the demands of the outer. Publication of his book-length series of autobiographical interviews with Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones (2008), was closely followed by national celebrations of Heaney’s seventieth birthday that included a stamp with his face on it and a jamboree of other hoopla. It all left him feeling he’d “sold out” or “betrayed” some part of himself that he’d fought valiantly to keep private. This loss of his sense of self left him creatively dry and inward-turning, depressed for the better part of a year. The final year’s letters keep harping on the silence, the dry well, the inactivity, even as he continued issuing benedictions on the work of others – an endless stream of books, poems, artworks, and projects that made their way to his door for his approval. Heaney (almost) never turned anyone away. It is startling to read of the generosity and self-revelation he sometimes bestows on total strangers – schoolboys sending him their first poems or amateurs sending him their one and only book.

I once went to hear a reading from Richard Ford, the Pulitzer Prize–winning American novelist, and he remarked that there are writers who have such large personalities that their friends could, for a time, shelter behind them. I was reminded of that remark by Heaney’s letters as he wrote again and again on behalf of contemporaries such as Derek Mahon, who did not share that quality of spirit and indeed wrote “pompous ass” on the bottom of a congratulatory letter Heaney sent. As Marie Heaney observed, it takes more than writing poetry quietly to win a Nobel Prize, and one may also compare Heaney’s behavior in public and private to that of other Nobel Prize winners. Joseph Brodsky wrote many letters on behalf of other Russian émigrés. In contrast, Derek Walcott, to my knowledge, did not promote other Caribbean authors. Heaney was faithful to his one wife and, as one of O’Shea’s interviewees put it, had an uncanny sense for avoiding the slightest possibility of scandal. He might move away from an attractive woman standing next to him at a photo opportunity despite it being an entirely innocent occasion. His idol Czesław Miłosz nursed his dying wife but was notorious for “hitting on” his students. These qualities are part of the legacy that a poet, especially a teaching poet, leaves behind. Heaney’s record is an unblemished pool you can look into through his letters and see, at worst, a few people he declined to provide with blurbs or cooperation for their own projects. From a remarkably early stage of his career, it was he whom all Ireland and indeed the United States poetry scene turned to for benediction. If he had been less generous, perhaps he would have been less famous, but he might also have written more poems in his seventieth year.

Reading the letters and O’Shea’s account, one can see Heaney’s fame consuming him, literally, with his relentless schedule leading to a stroke, heart fibrillations, a second stroke, and finally the emergency surgery from which he never awoke. O’Shea’s remarks on Heaney’s relations with his two agents confirm this view. One was rapacious and wanted to go for the largest possible purse at each reading, whereas Heaney was inclined to charge less and come back another year (like the good husbandry of a farmer). His second agent “tried to save Seamus from himself” and resist his tendency to grant a reading to whomever would ask. Initially, this generosity made him what he became; eventually, what he became killed him.

O’Shea also argues that the United States allowed Heaney a vantage point on the violence in Northern Ireland, a more relaxed audience to whom he could speak less guardedly than the charged national audience “at home” and a network of promoters who were not jealous of him. He developed a coded political stance as an artist, answering at public events in metaphorical language. The Nobel Prize left Heaney obliged, in O’Shea’s view, to comment on the Iraq war, quoting George Bush in Heaney’s version of Antigone titled The Burial at Thebes (2004) that departed markedly from the hard-won aesthetic distance Heaney had forged earlier. One might say that fame forced him to throw his caution to the wind.

A jokey postcard to a schoolmate will tell you Heaney “once fancied he had a vocation.” Though he may have lost his faith, ministering to whoever wanted it was never something he felt able to turn away.