Seamus Heaney’s power recalls that of early ‘Irish saints’

I heard tell of Seamus Heaney's death the morning it occurred. I was in Stockholm, and I resolved on a memorial issue of Irish Pages within the hour. That impulse morphed into two ampler companion volumes, Heaney and After Heaney.

The first focuses in particular on poetry, memoir, reminiscence and nonspecialist literary essays on the man and his work, but it also includes outstanding writing of all genres in a posthumous celebration of the enduring literary imagination in general. The sequel, just published, focuses on the maestro’s creative, critical and cultural legacy.

Several things struck me as I compiled that first volume, and subsequently. Whenever I spoke to anyone on this island familiar with Seamus Heaney I noticed that this person could almost always recollect vividly the moment that he or she heard the news of the great poet’s death. I found myself thinking that only once before had I experienced such a collective frisson of national loss: the death of JFK in the US, where I grew up.

Heaney, this seemed to suggest, was (and was felt to be) the greatest living Irish person at the time of his death – a thought I frequently had when he was alive.

So many people in Ireland and overseas read, admired and watched him. The extraordinary degree to which Heaney was a creative and ethical exemplar, shaper, mentor, influence and generous friend for his fellow poets and writers comes through especially powerfully in the first issue, with its 54 contributors from Ireland, Britain, the US and farther afield.

When the issue was finally released it came as no real surprise that we immediately received an inundation of interest and orders through our office, on our website (irishpages.org) and from the book trade.

But what was surprising was that this interest went way beyond the borders of the literary world, with its usual associations rooted in urban, cultural, intellectual and institutional milieux. Heaney had a unique reach into what the poet Eoghan Ó Tuairisc once affirmed as “the plain people of Ireland”. No wonder orders were arriving not just from conurbations, literati and universities but also from parishes and townlands, in virtually every county on the island.

In reflecting on the why of all this I am drawn yet again, almost against myself, to another idea about Heaney I have carried around for a good while: that in Seamus (whom I knew well) we come as close as we are likely to come in a modern context to the shaping and enlightening role, both contemporaneous and enduring, of the early “Irish saints” in relation to their surrounding communities.

These figures were not always clerics or anchorites, like Colmcille or St Kevin of Glendalough, and frequently not even “saintly” in our usual sense: they were often communal leaders or others of social, ethical or imaginative “power” whom the church converted later to its own hagiographical purposes, to its succession of “spiritual laureates”.

They are remembered even now, all over Ireland, when their sociological origins have long vanished, for the informing closeness to their home place of their ethical example, personal charisma or written testaments of succinct beauty.

Heaney belongs to the historiographical rather than the hagiographical, and indeed he was a most modern Nobel laureate, who never stopped travelling outwards from the always-close omphalos of Co Derry.

Nonetheless, for all that bigger world, no less important to his poetry, I daresay he will be remembered and read for centuries by the people of this island.

Chris Agee is editor of Irish Pages. His third collection, Next to Nothing, was shortlisted for the 2009 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry