Seamus Heaney: A poet of unfailing integrity

Following the death of Seamus Heaney, his friend and fellow poet Lachlan Mackinnon pays tribute to his dignity and dedication Seamus Heaney pointed out a pile of post nearly a foot high.

It was an average day's delivery to his house; things had quietened down since his receipt of the 1995 Nobel Prize some seven years earlier.

The dignity with which he handled the demands of a fame close to celebrity was remarkable, but it fitted with his character as a whole. Another time, in Dublin, an old man with a dog turned as we were leaving Glasnevin Cemetery and called "Thanks for the poetry!" Seamus waved and joked quietly, "I hire them".

I had already seen Seamus's stained-glass portrait in the bar of a hotel, and soon it would be on postage stamps. Heady stuff, but he bore it as lightly in the world as, among poets, he bore his pre-eminence.

He was immensely kind to younger poets, as though conscious that he was the one we all wanted to impress and aware how bad that might be for our work.

Like most readers, I first heard his name in the classroom, thanks to a master who was a fan of his earliest work. Years later, when I met Seamus Heaney, I knew that he was one of the most important poets of my time, that my teacher had been right.

We first met at a garden party in London in the late 1990s, and what struck me now was that he was shorter and slightly broader than I expected, somehow more visibly grounded.

His conversation was easy, generous and funny, but I was also conscious of being watched. The eye for nature shown in his first poems was also an eye for the human, and a sharp one.

When he was hospitalised after a stroke in 2006, the nurses were apparently surprised when Bill Clinton called in to see him. Clinton had already quoted him more than 10 years earlier when celebrating the Anglo-Irish Agreement (he spoke of "when hope and history rhyme", taken from Heaney's play The Cure at Troy), partly because Heaney's gift addressed the powerful as intimately as the humblest.

It also addressed more than the English-speaking world. Among his friends he could count the great Polish poet Czesaw Miosz and the Russian Joseph Brodsky. His commitment to poetry was to a vital force in human existence, not simply to one language or place.

His plunging into world poetry manifests itself magisterially in his elegy for the Pole Zbigniew Herbert (2001), and was also evident in The Rattle-Bag (1982), the anthology he assembled with his friend Ted Hughes.

Poetry was, he thought, a "natural, heady diversion", both a way of making the reader turn aside and an entertainment. It is also, of course, a way of making the poet turn aside.

Many — perhaps most — poets betray in their work or their lives some original wound their art tries to heal. The great puzzle with Heaney was that one could never tell what that hurt was, or whether there was one. He was clearly a more bookish boy than he let on.

He was aware to the end of his mother's life that, when speaking to her, he must revert to the provincial idiom she understood. He was born a Catholic in Northern Ireland and deeply aware of the oppression that entailed.

He knew that Irish-English was, from the perspective of literary London, itself a provincial idiom. His last book, Human Chain (2010), has a poem called Derry Derry Down, both a sing-song and a political reference. Heaney knew his place in the scheme of social things.

He noted these things, though, rather than griping about them. Perhaps poetry was, for him, a way of becoming serene in both art and life. If not born to kiss the princess, he could appreciate her as well as any. "Hwaet" is the first word of Beowulf, which Heaney translated to wide acclaim in 1999.

It is a notorious stumbling-block for translators, like the first sentence of Proust's A la recherche. "Wait", it suggests, but it also means something like "Listen". Heaney's ingenious solution is "So".

The word gathers to it everything that has gone before, but also implies that there is much to come. It marks the beginning of reflection. It represents the characteristic mode of Heaney's poems, to recount and reflect on experience.

His purpose, though, was less to describe than to convey an ethical vision. As Oxford's Professor of Poetry from 1989 to 1994, he said that, "In order that human beings bring about the most radiant conditions for themselves to inhabit, it is essential that the vision of reality which poetry offers should be transformative, more than just a printout of the given circumstances of its time and place.

The poet who would be most the poet has to attempt an act of writing that outstrips the conditions even as it observes them."

Heaney famously rejected the idea that he was himself British. "No glass of ours was ever raised/ To toast the Queen". In North (1975), he explored his agonising ability to "connive" in "civilised outrage" while simultaneously understanding what was "tribal, intimate" in political violence.

Feeling both, he courageously resisted all efforts to get him to take a political stance. In 1981, for instance, a leading member of Sinn Fein, Danny Morrison, met him on a train and urged him to support the IRA "dirty" protests.

Heaney replied that he wrote for himself, but when a neighbour's son died in the ensuing hunger strike he paid neighbourly respects to the dead man's body. Heaney's exuberant relish in the physicality of language was almost Keatsian.

Digging, the first poem in his first book, speaks of "a clean rasping sound/ When the spade sinks into gravelly ground". Our mouths are forced to echo the observed phenomenon.

In Human Chain we find The firebox, weighty, full to the brim With whitish dust and flakes still sparking hot. The line-break makes us hear the brimming in "brim", and "hot" seems for a moment to become a noun.

Heaney was first recognised for this gift, which resembled Ted Hughes's. If the danger for his early poems was that of being too easily teachable, reflecting his early job in a teacher-training college, they soon outgrew it.

Very unusually, he seemed to take the Nobel as an encouragement rather than a reward. The most important thing he learnt from his great predecessor WB Yeats was that a poet should continuously develop, and he made the most of that lesson.

His work approached new kinds of visionary strangeness without ever losing the reader's understanding. Engaging, funny, conscientious, wise; Seamus leaves us much to miss personally. However, his unfailing integrity and his unshowy dedication to an art he knew was greater than himself were exemplary.

A little bit of him will survive in any decent poet's conscience, while his work will feed the imaginations of generations to come. I am immensely privileged to have known him at all.