To many, Seamus Heaney is the preeminent Anglophone poet of the latter half of the twentieth century. He’s certainly one of the most celebrated. He was born in County Derry in 1939, and when he died in Dublin in 2013 his death reverberated around the world. It was reported with a huge photograph on the front page of The New York Times —above the fold. “Not even Frank got that!” as a New York cabbie said to a friend of mine. 1 By the time he died Heaney was much more than an Irish poet, more than the “smiling public man” of his Nobel predecessor Yeats’s later years; he had entered the kind of literary stratosphere where one is not only quoted by emperors and presidents but visited by them. His first collection, Death of a Naturalist , was published by Faber and Faber in 1966 and was followed by eleven other volumes of poetry, as well as collections of literary criticism, anthologies, translations, and verse plays.…