What is one to make of the phenomenon of Séamus Heaney? Widely praised by academics and critics on both sides of the Atlantic, he has held chairs at Harvard and at Oxford, is the subject of an extraordinary number of theses and studies, and in 1996 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In addition, he has a huge and enthusiastic following among the general public, and his latest volume of poetry The Spirit Level was last year on the best-seller list for several weeks, and this year has won Whitbread awards not only in the poetry section but also as Book of the Year.

Heaney has many very obviously appealing qualities as a person. With his traditional Catholic upbringing in a large family, and his still surviving rural background in Co. Derry, he seems an enviably rooted man. Much of his poetry is direct and accessible, and in the lecture-hall or on the radio he is a relaxed and affable presence. Yet alongside the warmth and ease of manner lies a complex and at times agonised character who has searched deeply both into his vocation as a poet and into the function of poetry itself, and some of his own words about this quest may justify referring to it as a truly spiritual pilgrimage; for example, in an article written in 1978 he describes the poetic vocation as requiring ‘a religious commitment to the ever-evolving disciplines of the art, which the poet has to credit as his form of sanctity’, and it is one of Heaney’s most disarming characteristics that he has not shirked from making known the pressures and tensions of his search.