How Seamus Heaney Became a Poet of Happiness
Answers
And then—his children grown or in their teens, his job and his reputation secure—Heaney decided to write about happiness. “Walk on air against your better judgment,” one of the poems from “The Spirit Level” (1996) suggests. ... In 1995, the Nobel Prize confirmed Heaney as a symbol both for poetry and for Irishness.
Seamus Heaney was real. Were he a fictional character, however, we likely would call him unrealistic, his life story and his career too good to be true. Like Robert Frost and W. H. Auden, but perhaps with fewer missteps and regrets, Heaney became the sort of modern poet whose best-known phrases circulate without attribution. At least four books are called, after Heaney’s “Song,” “The Music of What Happens”; Joe Biden and Bill Clinton have repeatedly quoted Heaney’s optimistic lines about peace in Northern Ireland, where “hope and history rhyme.” When casual readers of poetry think about Heaney, his Irishness, his charisma, his connection to thousands of years of poetic tradition (as shown by his translation of “Beowulf”), and his irenic political attitudes first come to mind.