From the Boston Review:
Seamus Heaney, as I’ve often said, was a mensch as well as a great poet. When he sent me a poem for the first issue of Slate (his wonderful “Little Canticles of Asturias”), I don't think he had any notion what an “internet magazine” might be. He gave me the poem because I asked him for one, and we were friends. Readers of Boston Review should know that his attachment to this place was deep. I think Boston and Cambridge supplied, a little, some haven from the central, sometimes fierce spotlight, for him, of being in Dublin or London. Here, there was a little refuge in being an outsider, as well as in the glare. He handled it all with class and generosity. When reading lives of writers, many great writers often behaving in ways that were petty or worse, I've thought to myself, “Thank god for Chekhov—a great writer who was also a decent, generous, good person.”
Well, thank god for Seamus.
More here. And here's the NYT obituary by Margalit Fox.