One of the worst possible inevitable things has happened. We've lost a towering talent and one of the great moral centers of the twentieth century. Because he was a poet loved by almost every human who loved poetry, watching people who may care very little about poetry hear the news and find a remembered snippet is the sweetest of tributes: A soul ramifying and forever / Silent, beyond silence listened for. ... The cool…

Seeing Seamus Heaney is a bit like seeing someone who should be dead, in that it’s only by the grace of God you’re alive at the same time as him. The stroke he had in 2006 nearly killed him, and now his hands flutter gently when he holds a book. I would say he’s less substantial than he was but the tremble gives him a slightly ethereal quality: not fragile, but somehow less earthbound. I…