ONE OF THE VENERATORS SEAMUS HEANEY 1939-2013

At the time of his death, Seamus Heaney was a central figure in the literary life of Ireland and a distinguished member of the international literary community. Though he became a venerable presence in the Republic of Letters, he remained, in his own phrase, "one of the venerators." Heaney's meticulous attention to the details of others' poems reflected his commitment to a formalist aesthetic and his preoccupation with the intricacies of language, but it also represented, at a microscopic level, his veneration for the art of poetry itself.