Compiling this book has brought me many gratifications, not the least of which has been the chance to hear Seamus Heaney’s voice again. Of course, in the ten years since his death, the globally disseminated and instantly recognisable Heaney public voice – speaking his poems into studio microphones, addressing audiences in lecture halls, answering the questions of interviewers – has not ceased to be accessible by way of electronic media. Perhaps no poet of our time has left such an abundant record. More than that, the impression given is that what has been offered for public consumption, to feed the curiosity generated by an outstanding body of published work, the poetry above all, contains within it an uncommonly generous helping of the personal. The recorded poems are not so much declaimed as confided to the listener; the lectures were never so tightly scripted as not to allow room for spontaneity and a teacherly transparency; and the answers supplied in interview seem to be retrieved from depths of self-interrogation that lend them a unique trustworthiness.

When all this is available, plentifully, as supplement to a poetic oeuvre that needs no apology in the first place, what of value can publication of the private letters add to the picture? Don’t we already know enough?

Consider Stepping Stones (2008) which, of all the works published in Heaney’s own lifetime, comes closest to full autobiographical disclosure. Growing out of interviews conducted over a number of years between Heaney and his younger friend, the poet Dennis O’Driscoll, remarkable for its Proustian richness of recall and air of candour as it takes the reader through the steps and stages of a well-documented career, it would appear to satisfy most reasonable needs. But does it? Designed to serve as a book of record, its publication quickly brought Heaney misgivings of his own. In a letter to the American essayist Sven Birkerts of 1 January 2009, he confesses: ‘Something faltered in me around Christmas ’07 when I had big doubts about the wisdom of having committed Stepping Stones; and then I think the fact that I had cadenced myself towards a conclusion in the last chapter of that book, allied to the fact that I’d let myself in for co-operation on that 70th birthday TV documentary – which felt a lot like a “summing up” exercise – all combined to induce a not so subliminal sense of an ending.’ To his old Belfast friend Michael Longley, on 11 July 2011, he describes the book flatly as being ‘meant to keep biographers at bay’.

If that was the case, he must have had some sort of holding action in mind, necessary to the defence of the very sources of his poetry. In a number of letters to the literary scholar Michael Parker that are included here, he is blunt about his dread of too intimate an encroachment. Writing on 2 November 1985, after learning that Parker had pursued his researches to the extent of seeking out and speaking to members of the Heaney family, he warned him: ‘There are whole areas of one’s life that one wants to keep free of the gaze of print – not that there is anything to cover up but that there is a sort of emotional robbery in the uncovering’; and on 12 July 1988 he was even more emphatic:

Heaney’s repetition of the word ‘robbery’ is telling: already by the time of the letters quoted above he was a conspicuous figure in the literary world of Ireland and beyond, exciting the broadest range of feelings in his readers and critics, from adulation to downright hostility, and he could not but be aware of it. This would have been a challenge to a writer who from the outset drew naturally and deeply on his personal experience, whether in the relatively unguarded poems of Death of a Naturalist, his first book, or in subsequent volumes where the personal was apt to be subjected to degrees of mythic transformation. Finding different ways by which to effect these transformations accounts, it seems to me, for the sense of continual self-renewal that his career gives us, especially at the early stages. The writing of Wintering Out, Heaney’s third volume, where personal and domestic matters are addressed, or tested, through a sort of linguistic archaeology, appears from his own reports to have been especially thrilling, confirming him – at a moment of deracination, as he and his family moved from Northern Ireland to make their home in the Republic – in his poetic vocation. Sweeney Astray, his translation of the Old Irish text Buile Shuibhne, begun around this time, concerns the plight of a more spectacularly displaced individual, who even so may be taken for the provisional spiritual disguise of a poet whose name happens to rhyme with his. North, hard on the heels of Wintering Out, shows Heaney turning his attention back to home territory, enabled to do so with startling force when the sacrificial Iron Age burials that the Danish archaeologist P. V. Glob had written about in The Bog People came to his notice, affording him a working metaphor – controversial as it proved to be – for the Troubles.

Among Heaney’s early correspondents, three stand out: Seamus Deane, his friend from St Columb’s College, the Catholic boys’ school in Derry; the Belfast Protestant Michael Longley; and Charles Monteith, born in Lisburn, Co. Antrim, who had made his career as a London publisher and was now Heaney’s editor at Faber and Faber. With the first two, both poets, Heaney enjoyed relations that his letters indicate were characterised by both true camaraderie and a laddish, bantering habit which could sometimes show a competitive edge. The relationship with Monteith, his senior and, in effect, his patron, was more straightforward; and it is Monteith above all in whom Heaney confides, the letters to him being those that trace most clearly the poet’s brisk professional debut and subsequent rapid progress, as well as his occasional detours and dead ends. Those to Deane and Longley, however, have no less a value; and perhaps they will have an even greater one for readers well acquainted with the poetry for whom Heaney’s off-duty high spirits, comic flair and tendency to pranks and naughtiness may be surprising news. In the last, he was abetted by another northern compadre, the singer and television director David Hammond. The 1968 reading tour titled Room to Rhyme, which Heaney, Hammond and Longley – one Catholic, two Protestants – undertook together, was promoted by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and had a serious, quasi-evangelical purpose in asserting the possibility of cultural pluralism even as widespread sectarian strife was beginning to appear unavoidable; but it was also a matter of three boyos on the lash, with all the scampishness that implied. Heaney’s occasional bawdy letters and postcards to Hammond, some verging on what would now be regarded as political incorrectness, some diving with glee straight into it, are an expression of the need to let off steam felt by a writer otherwise driven by an unremitting sense of duty and accountability. The undated 1976 postcard to Hammond is included here as a token of this strain.

If my selection of letters has a principal theme, it is Heaney’s obligation to duty. From the start, it manifests itself in a variety of ways. One of these was the sense of himself as a teacher that Heaney seems never to have lost. After graduating from Queen’s University Belfast in 1961, with a first class honours degree, he took a diploma course at St Joseph’s College of Education before going on to teach at St Thomas’s Secondary Intermediate School in Ballymurphy, Belfast. Then he returned to St Joseph’s as a lecturer, which is where we find him at the start of this book. For much of the rest of his life teaching supplied him with an income, and even at the period immediately following his move to Co. Wicklow in the Republic in the early 1970s, when he hoped to make a go of survival as a freelance, he was trying to persuade Charles Monteith and others at Faber and Faber to commission educational books from him. Although none materialised, perhaps this is not to be regretted as Heaney’s strong teaching impulse was duly channelled elsewhere, into the more broadly ranging and...