Author of last year's surprise best seller, an updated translation of the Old English epic Beowulf, the Irish poet says he'd welcome any excuse to have potatoes before 9 in the morning. Mr. Heaney was at the University of Tulsa recently to inaugurate a visiting professorship named for Darcy O'Brien, a friend who died in 1998. He and Mr. Heaney met, appropriately enough, at a 1969 wake for an Irish poet, W.R. Rodgers. One of the other glories of civilization for Mr. Heaney, besides American breakfasts, is, of course, poetry. It's a glory that Mr. Heaney has continually felt the need to defend, to shore up.
Agriculture has no space for high culture.
I'll dig with it. It's one of my notions, that a function of the poet is to stand up for poetry. But rather than discarding the old rural ways, replacing them with literature, Mr. Heaney's poetry absorbed them, reinhabited them in the sensuous detail of peat and rain, rusted anvil and water pump. He sought continuity with those traditions rather than a break from them. By the late '70s, Irish and British critics, while acknowledging his poetry's primal power, began to question its relevance.