A poet’s own epitaphs
In late August, the world lost poet Seamus Heaney, who died in his native Ireland at age 74. Harvard also lost this modest, tender, ebullient man who first arrived to teach in 1979, setting off a series of academic appointments that officially ended in 2006. In the midst of them, Heaney won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. His death was marked Thursday by a service of remembrances and readings sponsored by the Department of English. Heaney’s appointments were there, first as a visiting professor, then as the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory (1985-1997), and then as the Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence (1998-2006). It was a chilly, rainy late afternoon — Irish weather — and the pews at Memorial Church were nearly full. Present were those “who loved Seamus on and off the page,” said Peter Sacks, Harvard’s John P. Marquand Professor of English. The eulogies were many, but nearly all...