Seamus Heaney’s Journey Into Darkness

I called “Frontiers of Writing,” Seamus Heaney remembered an evening he spent as the guest of an Oxford college in May 1981. A “quintessentially Oxford event,” he called it: He attended chapel alongside a former lord chancellor of the U.K., went to a big dinner, slept in a room belonging to a Conservative cabinet minister. Heaney would not have been ill at ease in these environs. True, he was a long way from the farmhouse in Derry, in the north of Ireland, where he had been born in 1939, but by that time he was famous (for a poet) and even cosmopolitan. Awards and acclaim had been a constant since the publication of his first book, , in 1966; a wistful post-agrarian sensibility in combination, or collision, with a crunching exactitude of language made his poetry irresistible.