Seamus
Heaney's death last week left a rift in our lives, and in poetry,
that won't easily be mended. A Nobel Laureate, a devoted husband, a
sharp translator, a beloved friend, and the big-hearted leader of the
"Government of the Tongue," Seamus was a poet of
conscience; his close-friend and fellow poet Paul Muldoon said,
"He was the only poet I can think of who was recognized
worldwide as having moral as well as literary authority." Poetry
was a vocation that he dedicated his life to, something he believed
had "the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our
consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness
all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and
gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable,
in so far as they too are an earnest of our veritable human
being." Uncannily attuned to the voices of the world around him,
his poems made both the personal and collective subconscious realms
concrete in language.
In this time of sorrow for his family,
friends, and the literary community, we would like to celebrate his
remarkable life and work. Seamus Heaney was our Wordsworth, our
Keats, our Hopkins, our Yeats. To commemorate this remarkable artist,
we asked some of his friends and fellow poets to share a memory or a
reflection on his work. We are grateful to Paul Muldoon, Henri Cole,
Robert Pinsky, Frank Bidart, Maureen N. McLane, Michael Hofmann,
Tracy K Smith, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, C. K. Williams and Paul Elie
for their contributions.
We will continue to add to our tribute in the coming weeks as more
people come to us with their remembrances.
Read on...
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