Concluding his essay on Wallace Stevens in Poetry and the Age, Randall Jarrell commented: “A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times
a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.” If that is so, Seamus Heaney was a lightning rod. From Death of a Naturalist through Human Chain, his exquisitely conceived poems demonstrated rare wisdom
and an uncanny talent for conveying our emotional experience in clear, natural language. But Seamus Heaney was more than a poet to those who connected with his work.
As the eloquent obsequies celebrating his life attest, Heaney had a universally perceived ability to foster a genuine intimacy with his readers in a way that was beyond words.