Seamus Heaney's Extraordinary Generosity
From their first meeting to their final letters, a poet friend remembers the Irish poet's kindness.
A rattle bag of memories has flashed through my mind without any particular order or end since the funeral:
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How odd and "scaresome," to use a word in one of Seamus’s early poems, to think of him as mere memory, that I would never get to be in his company again. You were not "only you" but "you too" when you were with him. So many people would say the same in the media over the coming days and weeks. With him you became your best self.
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The first time I met him was for a drink in the now-defunct in Harvard square after I, a young poet from Cork, rang him out of the blue with my first book. The nervousness I felt before meeting him quickly turned to ease in his company. As we finished up and he rushed off to catch a flight to a
