The Contrarian Poet

Spillane indicates that for an artist as often esteemed for his graciousness and generosity as for the range and brilliance of his lyric gift, poet Seamus Heaney nonetheless accepted the fact that putting noses out of joint across a spectrum of ideologies is the collateral damage a poet inflicts by doing honest work. For the three decades during which civil war devastated his native North of Ireland--his poems testified to nightmare interrogations, explosions and executions--Heaney could count on being drubbed by one faction for being insufficiently outspoken, and accused by another of seeding his verses with sectarian codes.