Madam, - The letters concerning Seamus Heaney and the 1981 hunger strikes (August 31st, September 5th) put me in mind of EM Forster's comments on TS Eliot's poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which was published in 1917, the bleakest year of the first World War. Forster declared the poem "a protest, and a feeble one, but the more congenial for being so feeble. He who could turn aside to complain of ladies and drawing-rooms preserved a tiny drop of our self-respect, he carried on the human heritage".
George Orwell found a similar congeniality in the novels of Henry Miller, who isolated himself from the elevated notions of political "relevance" demanded by writers of the 1930s (Inside the Whale, 1940).
Future historians and biographers might find Heaney's personal, unique voice and his silence on the so-called national "struggle" a more eloquent testimony to the triumph of the human spirit over the adversity of the Troubles than any ersatz lamentation written to suit political taste or popular feeling.
- Yours, etc,
TOBY JOYCE, Balreask Manor, Navan, Co Meath.