I flinched from the news of Seamus Heaney’s death; after which a great desolation set in. It was possible to be sure that many people would be feeling the same way. I’d known him as his journal editor, and soon his close friend, for more than 50 years. At the start of the Sixties he was already a name in Ireland, but had yet, I believe, to appear in print in England. It was the best of good fortune to get to know him, and would have been even if he’d never written a line. He had about him an angelic goodness, with none of the shortcomings with which angels have sometimes been associated.
The picture of his progress from the country work of poems