I am so sad to hear that Seamus Heaney has died aged 74. His powerful precise poems have been inspirational to me since I was a student. In Elegy he wrote a great truth:
“The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.”
He wrote with such humanity, about farmers and memories and violence in Northern Ireland and love and life and our responsibilities to each other in art and occupation. He talked of “lyric defiance” being as important as “civic responsibility”. He made the best translation of Beowulf, and with Ted Hughes he edited a brilliant collection of poems designed to lure people back into poetry. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was a gift to us all.
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