SEAMUS HEANEY celebrates his 70th birthday on Monday and today we we commemorate the occasion and his unique contribution to Irish literature in a special supplement. Since his inaugural collection, Death of a Naturalist, the Nobel Laureate has not only earned the acclaim of the critics, academia and his contemporaries but also the truly deserved affections of a wider and devoted public audience. His work, as has been said, found its "way into the inner ear of the multitude".
That wide appeal owes much to the poet’s rootedness in home territory and the familiarity of many of his themes but ultimately it stems from his innate and instinctive lyric gifts. His fellow poet Derek Walcott perfectly sums up the essence of Heaney’s artful and regenerative skill with language when he calls it a combination of the colloquial and the sublime.
Since his rendezvous with literary destiny in the 1960s, his poetry has progressively moved outward to embrace the “mass and majesty of the world”. Yet, he has never lost sight of the nurturing role of the home-place: he has been a celebrant of the heartlands of his Derry childhood and youth, as well as his adopted Wicklow landscape. His affinities with the wider European tradition are demonstrated in translations and versions that have refreshed the work of Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Rilke and others from that storehouse where his own work now has its place of permanence and honour.
While the local stands at the heart of Heaney’s poetry, he is in every sense a universal poet and most notably one of “ethical depth” as his Nobel citation declared. The pitch and clarities of his language and the power of his imaginative responses have transmuted the familiar and ordinary into poetry of burnished eloquence.
But his role has gone far beyond literary eminence. He has recognised, as he tells us in Stepping Stones, that his calling as a poet puts him "in line for a certain amount of community service". That service has been rendered with abundant generosity and geniality. Our community is fortunate to have a voice of such precision and potency to speak on its behalf when events require expressions of sentiment and thought to "set the darkness echoing". Nowhere has this been more evident than in Heaney's responses to the tragedies of the North, where his poetic resolve was to give personal witness rather than accommodation of any agenda. His work continues to flourish and surprise and give the world — as this newspaper said of Yeats on his 70th birthday — "an unbroken flow of perfect song".