Heaney on Larkin
 

I found this in an article by Seamus Perry in the London Review of Books about a new book (by R. F. Foster) on Heaney ...

"In 1982 Heaney contributed a superb essay to Philip Larkin's sixtieth birthday celebrations about the way light floods into Larkin's poetry with a feeling of immense if inexplicable redemptiveness ..."

I think that sounds about right.

But I also loved this aside, about James Joyce and English ...

"Joyce wasn't remotely troubled, as Corkery was, by the thought that writing in the coloniser's language was a problem; on the contrary, he usually gives the impression that English had been twiddling its thumbs waiting for him to come along and make something of it."

Roy Foster's book On Seamus Heaney (Princeton, 2020) is a first-rate account of his life and his writing.

Clive

I have read, and enjoyed, his two volume biography of Yeats. And his history of Ireland. Not the Heaney yet.

Yes, I have read these excellent books, too. (What a strange fellow Yeats was...)

Clive