How Seamus Heaney Wrote His Way Through a War

In The New Yorker, Visiting Lecturer on English Maggie Doherty reviewed the letters of Seamus Heaney, the former Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. An excerpt is included below. 

"When people asked the poet Seamus Heaney what it was like to be living in Belfast, Northern Ireland, at the start of the Troubles, he tended to downplay the violence: “Things aren’t too bad in our part of the town.” But things were, in fact, quite bad. A kind of martial law obtained. British soldiers, brought in to suppress a Catholic civil-rights movement, ran checkpoints, frisked young men, and stopped drivers for the smallest infractions. Aggressive slogans adorned buildings: “Keep Ulster Protestant,” “Keep Blacks and Fenians Out of Ulster.” Worst of all were the bombs, which exploded everywhere and seemingly at random: in department stores, in transit centers, in pubs, in banks. Some were planted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army, others by Protestant vigilantes."

Read more here.