The death of Helen Vendler, Porter University Professor emerita, on April 23, deprived readers of perhaps the greatest American critic of poetry. The arrival days later of the enormous galley of The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $40), was a happy reminder of the warm friendship between the two. Heaney, Litt.D. ’98, a Nobel laureate who served as Boylston professor from 1985 to 1997 (he died in 2013), loomed large on campus, but a more intimate figure emerges from his letters to Vendler about her Seamus Heaney, interpreting his art. These excerpts bring both back to life.
15 August 1997, Dublin. The Feast of the Assumption. On this morning the Ancient Order of Hibernians used to march out from the “tin hut”—a corrugated iron barn that was their hall—with pipes skirling and banners flying to the tune of “I’ll Sing a Hymn to Mary.” To-day there should be banners hefted and astream and massed pipes and drums for the hymn to Helen. I am sorry not to have written before now in response to such wonderful letters from you, after Cambridge and after completion of the book. And I am further cast down by my inability to lay my hands on the latter just at this moment, more evidence of the moult-down in self and study. There is such jubilation in all that you do, such volts of your own spirit. It is as if Hopkins were to turn the bunsen of his younger, exhilarated being upon one—I feel not only blessed that you have written the book, indeed could bear to write it; but magnified by your constant huge kindness and care.…Genuine need for people to testify—in your absence—to the intensity of their gratitude, because of good deeds you’ve done for them, but really to their delight in your being who you are and giving yourself to all of us—all the powers and dazzles you embody and manifest. I cannot imagine how you live at such a pitch of devotion to the work you do and the people you know. If I think of the achieve of it, I’ll sink under my sheer plod, go cindery rather than gold vermilliony.
21 October 1997, Glanmore Cottage, Ashford, Co. Wicklow. You should have heard from me long before this.…But I wanted to have read your book about the poems, and while I have occasionally swooped and stolen into it for short spaces of time, it was only this morning that I gave myself over to silence, Glanmore and autumn and read the whole manuscript at a sitting. Madness not to have done so before, but you will know my hamperedness when it comes to reading about myself.…In this case, it was such a honey-combing and harveststing, such a granary of rewards, that I am more than usually angry at myself for not having read the thing earlier and sung out my hallelujah. I am all atingle with the seraphic—your own word of approbation that slew me altogether—quality of your writing.
