Today’s New York Times reports the death of Seamus Heaney, a fact that might serve to remind us that we have not lacked great poets even in a time when the death of poetry has become a commonplace. It was Hölderlin who asked the question that even in his own time was far from rhetorical: “What are poets for in a destitute time.” Martin Heidegger picked up the question and made it the center of little book of essays that has been translated as Poetry, Language, Thought. But the career of Seamus Heaney is both a better and a more comprehensive answer to Hölderlin’s question than Heidegger’s answer, perhaps because Heidegger wasn’t a very good poet and may not have understood that not all poetry is to be subsumed under the rubrics of German romanticism.

Of course, claims like the ones Heaney makes in The Redress of Poetry, a 1995 collection of his own essays on poets and poetry, have a kinship to Heidegger’s, because both speak out of a tradition that has identified poets with biblical prophets on the one hand and Socrates on the other. But Heaney’s thoughts about poetry seem fresher and more vital than Heidegger’s, which seem derivative instead. Consider this, from the preface to Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, which has liberated that wonderful poem from its history for a generation of students:

Without some melody sensed or promised, it is simply impossible for a poet to establish the translator’s right-of-way into and through a text. I was therefore lucky to hear this enabling note almost straight away, a familiar local voice, one that had belonged to relatives of my father’s, people whom I had once described in a poem as “big voiced Scullions.”
     I called them “big voiced” because when the men of the family spoke, the words they uttered came across with a weighty distinctness, phonetic units as separate and defined as delph platters displayed on a dresser shelf. A simple sentence such as “We cut the corn to-day” took on immense dignity when one of the Scullions spoke it. They had a kind of Native American solemnity of utterance, as if they were announcing verdicts rather than making small talk. And when I came to ask myself how I wanted Beowulf to sound in my version, I realized I wanted it to be speakable by one of those relatives.

Heaney was a professor, at Queens University, Oxford, and Harvard, among others; but he was not an academic poet. His verse is accessible, earthy, and it often rhymes. He was as likely to claim kinship with Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, and Elizabeth Bishop, as with other academics of his generation. Here is a montage of video recordings of Heaney reading one of his most famous poems, “Digging,” about his father, but also about his own sense of his vocation.

Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. His NYT obituary quuotes this encomium from an Irish Times editorial written in recognition of that achievement.

Book sales may not mean much in the areas of fiction or biography, but for a poet to sell in the thousands is remarkable proof to his ability to speak in his poems to what are inadequately called ‘ordinary people.’ Yet the popularity of his work should not be allowed to obscure the fact that this deep, at times profound poetry, forged through hard thinking and an attentive, always tender openness to the world, especially the natural world.

RIP Seamus Heaney . . .