Helen Vendler

In 1975, at the Yeats International Summer School, I heard Seamus read from North, and my life was altered. I wanted intensely to write about that volume, and did, and about others since. The poems from Death of a Naturalist through District and Circle have become part of my habitual web of thought, not merely thought about poetry but thought about life. Seamus broadened my view of Ireland, North and South - its geography, its history, its labour, its sounds, its euphemisms, its crises of conscience, its bog bodies, its bombs, its weather, its sectarian stand-offs, its twilights. And he deepened my view of our common life in his poetic bildungsroman - from Mossbawn to St Columb's and Queen's, to marriage and Glanmore and children, to the United States, to Greece, to the Nobel - always alert, always noticing, whether it was his Aunt Mary baking scones, or the sounds not easy for strangers (Broagh), or the feel of a pitchfork, or dialect differences - "midges" for Keats's "gnats" - or the torque of the Tollund Man's neck.

It was ravishing to read his successive collections, with their reticent candour and eager appetite, their exploration of love and their gravity in sorrow, their fascination with difference. Mandelstam and Milosz were in his eye, as well as Yeats and Kavanagh (and Frost); and as his "Alphabets" of view widened, from the "little leaning hoe" chalked on slate through Latin and Irish to the astronaut seeing the whole globe from space, his poetry went from its agricultural beginnings to political allegory, from youthful energy to family grief, from the solid to the invisible.

Every volume differed from its predecessors; allegories appeared where tableaux once were; great sequences appeared where short lyrics once filled the pages. And Seamus's principled faith in "the redress of poetry" has not been destroyed even by his own most savage depictions of human cruelty. When a quotation rises to my lips, I discover, over and over, that it is Seamus who is speaking to me in words I hardly realised I knew by heart.

Robert Pinsky

The words guest and host come from the same Indo-European root, I've read: information that inspires me to imagine a concept that involves generosity and consideration as a single principle circulating between one-time strangers. Guest-hostly-ness. a grace in giving and in receiving that melds the two. In my experience Seamus Heaney has a great, true genius for that grace. I have experienced that quality of his in many parts of the world.

As a guest in California, he made me grateful to hear the variations of Catholic upbringing shared among Heaney, Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Hass, and Frank Bidart one memorable and mellow evening. And I, a Jewish anthropologist, enchanted. At Seamus's rented house in Cambridge, when I was powerfully aware of his great poem-translation Ugolino, my host and I went over Dante pages and pieces, and he ended by saying of the Inferno: "You do it - and do it quickly." At Bidart's apartment, we three read from various English-language versions of The Aeneid, unanimously declaring Dryden champion. On that same evening, Seamus recited from memory a good bit of The Cremation of Sam McGee.

In Dublin, he has been my host more than once, and pleased me terribly with a compliment I treasure: the man took me to a favorite pub, one that featured a highly esteemed, small and somewhat secret snug - a benched nook which some instinct (perhaps ancestral; my grandfather was a barkeeper) led me to on my own. How I glowed with satisfaction when we returned and he reported to Marie: "We went to the Whatever, and Pinsky made right for the snug as if he'd been going there all his life." (I hope he doesn't tell that to all the Americans.)

A gift for laughter and for friendship, a generosity entirely congruent with the qualities of his great gift and accomplishment in art.

Paul Muldoon

It's been a thrill to have known Seamus Heaney for more than 40 of his 70 years. If ever the concept "generous to a fault" has had a corporeal manifestation it's surely in him. Our relationship has always had a fateful aspect, involving time and place. It's an aspect that we've both chosen to find delightful rather than dismaying, invigorating rather than invidious. I think of a story that seems barely credible but somehow crucial. I was driving along West 35th Street in Manhattan one morning about 10 years ago. A yellow cab pulled out in front of me without so much as a by your leave. I stood on the brakes and sounded my horn in exasperation. The cab sped away. I was scheduled to meet Seamus, who was in New York on what were then rare enough visits, for dinner that evening in Tabla, the great Indian fusion restaurant on Madison Avenue. He was at the bar when I arrived and came towards me immediately with "Were you by any chance driving along West 35th Street this morning?" "Maybe." "That was me in the back of that cab."

John F Deane

WHILE READING my poems in exotic places abroad I have often been approached by people who say: "Oh, you're an Irish poet. You must know Seamus Heaney?" So often did this happen that I began to reply: "Who?" "Heaney, Seamus Heaney, the poet, you know?" I'd shake my head doubtfully until my questioner realised that he or she was being teased.

But I quickly came to know what a meaningful, clear trail Seamus Heaney had left behind him across the world's landscape, a trail of uplift and admiration, of high standards and, above all, a trail that conferred honour on those of us following behind.

I had thought of poetry in terms of the Hopkins poem, Heaven-Haven:

Or in the early Yeats piece: "Come away oh human child . . ./ for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand." But poets like Heaney and like Thomas Kinsella had shown me how vital poetry can be, and is, to the welfare of human society. I came across the words of Czeslaw Milosz:

Heaney's gloss on this suggests: "It is a question that concerns the redress of poetry, by which I mean the need poets feel to align themselves with those who have been wronged, to repair and compensate for injustices suffered, to stay mindful of the miseries of the world."

In his own poem, From the Republic of Conscience, Heaney has offered example in image and irony, in distance and involvement, a parable that touches on the deepest human urgencies of our time: the need to rediscover and reinvigorate the highest ideals by which we can survive: "At their inauguration, public leaders must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep to atone for their presumption to hold office."

If this is offered somewhat tongue-in-cheek, poems that come later, in District and Circle for instance, create just such a mindfulness "of the miseries of the world": Out of Shot, Anything Can Happen, Helmet and other pieces. Heaney's pilgrim's progress across the landscape of poetry has been, then, exemplar and encouragement to all of us, to urge the redress of poetry in a world spinning free of its human dignity, in pushing poetry to the limits of its powers, and, while doing so, to offer verse that reaches, to go back to Hopkins, "the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation", to stir the spirit towards redemption.

Peter Fallon

It's a far cry from his first letter (Ashley Avenue, 24 November 1971) enclosing a poem which I published in a limited edition and which, within a month, I brought to Belfast for him to sign. Our first meeting. It was a far cry from that famous phone call, the one from Pylos to Christopher at home by Sandymount Strand that Friday in October 1995, when he learned what the world knew already - he'd won the Nobel Prize.

And it was another call, one - as it happens - that I missed, one of a handful from that "secret destination" in the Peloponnese in the breathless high of his new circumstances. In that jubilant effusion he voiced a gratitude for kindness and trust and said what they meant and, more important, would mean as he faced into the glorious mystery ahead. He spoke then of how he'd need friendship even more in the times to come. I played it once - and I wept with joy.

Two months later I wept again - with pride this time as well - as he, at the podium of the Swedish Academy expounded that harrowing report of a holding of hands in fellowship a moment before a group of Protestant workers, forced from a minibus by masked assailants, were separated and slaughtered.

When that packed, rapt crowd rose to applaud I was standing beside a member of that arcane Academy, Östen Sjöstrand, who three days later presented Seamus to the king to receive his medal. I said to him: "But you must be used to this, you who attend the Nobel lectures every year." And he pronounced: "I have never seen such a reception in all of my life." Even there...

I've come in the four decades to know a man whose composure and grace rarely slip. But I've seen, too, a man who can look bewildered, even lost, because, despite the worldwide esteem and the long years he has been supportive, attentive, instructive, amusing, consoling, he doesn't know how much it is he whom we need, how utterly grateful we are for his presence.

Henri Cole

In the late 1990s, for five years, I taught at Harvard as a lecturer in the Department of English, where Seamus Heaney was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. He was warmly supportive of my work. I think he was then the age I am now, though he was already famous. He didn't mind that I was a poet whose audience hadn't yet awakened to me. I think he has immense dignity, and this was useful to observe as I was searching for ways of being in the world of poetry. When he was a student poet at Queen's University, his pseudonym was Incertus - Latin for "uncertain". Still, post-Nobel, he has humility, though fame usually makes us vain.

Over the years, I took many things he said under advisement. When I published my fourth collection of poetry, The Visible Man, I was worried it would be narrowly defined by its gay content, but Seamus objected, using the word "arena" - the arena of human emotion, he called it - which is where all good poems must operate, rather than catering to special interests. The arena of human emotion was where my poems would find a place, he insisted, because the feelings in them were familiar to us all and because the language had a complex geology. I didn't expect this from the son of an Irish cattle dealer.

Seamus believes writing can change things, as in the episode where Jesus writes in the sand and diverts a crowd from stoning a woman who has committed adultery. It's Jesus writing on the ground with his finger that diverts the angry mob, and as Seamus has said, it "takes the eyes away from the obsession of the moment". For me, Seamus's poems call to mind The Prelude, in which Wordsworth looks out over the side of the boat at still water, solacing himself, and sees the gleam of his own image mixed up with pebbles, roots, rocks and sky. Time and history and thought and self all merge in a most alluring way.

Barrie Cooke

Sometime around 20 years ago, I made two portraits, both of friends. One was of Seamus Heaney, the other of Norah Ring. By chance, recently, both portraits were sold at auction. The one of Seamus went for an absurdly high price, and the one of Norah wasnüt sold at all, even though I know it is the better painting of the two. I said this to Seamus. And he agreed. I said it to him because I knew that I could, without offending him. He is a decent man.

From time to time someone will say that he canüt really be like that - it is a fake. But he is. He genuinely likes people. He is a genuinely good person. And so are his wife Marie and their children. Sonja Landweer, the sculptor and potter, with whom I lived for 25 years, is also a friend of Seamusüs. We have both found him generous in spirit. Although he is a man with far too many demands on his time, when the occasion has arisen heüs written eloquently about each of us.

He knows a little about painting. I know a little about poetry. Enough so that we can talk about both. We get on well, and we have for 30 years now. I think of him as a good friend, in every sense. But he is a man with many friends, and quite rightly so.

Barrie Cooke's portrait of Seamus Heaney is currently on show as part of a portraits exhibition in the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny

Andrew Motion

Seamus Heaney was the first poet I read in earnest: I was 16, and my English teacher - pleased and surprised that I'd just started writing poems myself - told me to get hold of Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark (which had just come out) because I'd liked Digging when we studied it in class.

Recent-ness (the thrill of hearing a new voice) was a part of the pleasure the books gave me. But an even more valuable gift, because it made me feel welcome in a form that was new to me, was a kind of familiarity.

Heaney's Derry-farm childhood was a far cry from my own East Anglian upbringing, but there were enough references to things I recognised - taps in the yard, yards themselves, a rainy landscape of hedges and ditches - to make me feel at home. And also to make me feel that home was writable.

The conversation between new things and old things has deepened steadily and wonderfully in Heaney's work since then. And it has done so alongside other conversations between private things and public things, ordinary things and marvellous things, the local and the global.

Listening to these conversations as they have continued to appear in books over the years has been one of my deepest delights as a reader. Indeed, I count myself blessed to have been alive through the run of them, and to feel their greatness as both a informing and a liberating power. An arrival and a setting-forth. Happy birthday Seamus. Many happy returns.

Joseph Woods

Great poetry has an ease in attaching itself to the memory or personal vernacular and the way in which we interpret a landscape. The work of Seamus has always been present for me, all my reading life, a given since I was born the year Death of a Naturalist was published. Even the more recent poems have embedded themselves; I can't look at the bounce of a blackbird without thinking of The Blackbird of Glanmore; passing a pig farm in Louth recently recalled "We were killing pigs..."from the poem Anahorish 1944; the half-light, sonorous music of Quitting Time puts me in mind of a close relative; I could go on. Right at the heart of Heaney's work is his self-renewing force. When Seamus won the Nobel (every poet in Ireland and beyond must know where they were), I had just enrolled on a creative writing MA in the then Poets' House on Islandmagee under the late James Simmons. Jimmy burst into our class near lunchtime with a bottle of whiskey and some tumblers and announced the news. We all toasted Seamus, and appropriately there was a photograph of him above the fireplace to hold a glass to.

Was there ever a poet more globally famous in his lifetime? And yet he handles it humbly with warmth, generosity and the necessary patience. He is Ireland's great cultural ambassador and if he lived in Japan, he would long ago have been designated "Living National Treasure" a title conferred only to the greatest craftsmen. As a nation we are gifted to have him and the work, long may we acknowledge it.