He's a poet I and most Irish people of my generation will associate strongly with school. In fact, I think he may have been the only living poet on the whole English curriculum. He was never my favourite (Bishop and Plath shared that spot, and there was also a fascination with Gerard Manley Hopkins but mostly only due to the whole repressed homosexual thing... the class where our teacher talked about how one line of his could be interpreted to mean anal masturbation with a crucifix was particularly entertaining) but there was something very familiar and home-like about him. Even since primary school, we had been taught how important he was, that he was a Nobel laureate and that was kind of a big deal, a point of Irish pride. He was someone who reminded you that our great reputation for writers (which struggles for air sometimes amongst our other less impressive reputations) wasn't necessarily dead and buried.
I'm no great reader of Heaney. I knew a handful of his poems, and that's about it. Of course, Mid-term Break was the big one for us. Maybe the first time a poem made me cry, and I'm probably not alone. A little boy in our school was killed on the road outside, his older brother just a little younger than me, and it was read at the funeral, or the school service, I can't remember which.
And then later it was Digging, and Bogland, and though back then the sentiments never truly struck me, I remember feeling like I could smell those poems, smell those words. He always chose such pungent words!
You know you're getting older when you hear someone died at age 74 and think "but that's so young.. sort of." At least he got his recognition in his lifetime, and that's something.
