[David Callin]

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."