IT'S OFTEN SAID that few Nobel Prize winners produce anything of note after receiving the nod from Stockholm. The burden of expectations and the time-killing ambassadorial demands on laureates are considered fatal for creative energies. When Seamus Heaney was decorated mid-career by the Swedish Academy in 1995, fears that the then 57-year-old would fall foul of Stockholm syndrome were rampant. Extra-literary concerns clearly contributed to the Nobel committee's choice of an Irish writer, coming on the heels of historic strides towards peace in Ulster. Yet the gesture was rare in recent Nobel history in attracting scant opposition.
A decade later, and three books deeper into his career, Heaney has proved himself immune to the Nobel curse. After the death of his close friend Ted Hughes in 1998, he's indisputably the most celebrated living poet in the English language. Eschewing the obscurity of modernists such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, Heaney's books are as popular as they are critically lauded. They sell in the hundreds of thousands, figures almost unheard of for poetry. In Britain, Heaney's volumes make up two-thirds of the sales of works by living poets.
His often-remarked-on humility was similarly unaffected by 'the Stockholm thing' or 'the N-word' (as Heaney embarrassedly calls it). He continued to shoulder a full teaching load at Harvard University, where he was poet in residence. 'I didn't want to seek special status because I was a poet - didn't want to confuse my calling with my profession,' he says. Rather than just conducting poetry workshops, Heaney lectured in British and Irish poetry because, he says, 'I didn't want to swan about in the robes of my creativity.'
He writes in an ascetic attic of his Dublin home, where he lives with his wife of four decades, the author Marie Heaney (who, along with her husband, is a guest at the literary festival). Heaney's office is fitted out with only a desk, a photocopier, a single bed and books. 'I don't want to don the armour of ego or the costume of the stage poet, with my special set of pencils and handmade paper,' he says. 'I want a hand-to-hand engagement with myself - self-forgetfulness rather than self-consciousness.'
Heaney wears his learning unpretentiously, his commentary sprinkled with quotations from his heroes: Joseph Brodsky, Czeslaw Milosz, Eliot, Robert Frost and W.B. Yeats. Commenting on the process by which a poem emerges, he quotes Frost: 'Sight, excite, insight.'
'By the time you start to compose, more than half the work has been done. The crucial part of the business is what happens before you face the empty page - the moment of first connection, when an image or a memory comes suddenly to mind and you feel the lure of the poem life in it.'