Jeffrey Meyers at Salmagundi:
Seamus Heaney was born on April 13,1939 (12 days after me) and 3 months after the death of Yeats. The Letters* begin in 1965, his miraculous year. His first book, Death of a Naturalist, was accepted by Faber & Faber; he got a teaching job at his alma mater, Queen’s University in Belfast; and he married Marie Devlin, whom he was pleased to call Madame and Herself.
In September 1970 he began teaching at Berkeley, whose spectacular scenery and wild freedom were the polar opposite of dreary and repressed Belfast. He described the weirdness of Telegraph Avenue as if he’d landed on Mars: “[It’s] one of the most fantastic scenes you can imagine. Hippies, drop-outs, freak-outs, addicts, Black Panthers, Hare Krishna American kids with shaved heads, begging bowls and clothes made out of old lace curtains. …[It] has all the colour of the fairground and as much incense burning as a high altar in the Vatican. When I walk home from the campus I can almost hear the joss sticks frizzling in every apartment. The fragrant follies of lotos land.” He got into the act by growing his own wild mop of curly knots and heavy Victorian side whiskers.
He was unusually severe about the 42 students in his poetry writing course, who had more cheek than talent. Naming the three current gurus, he exclaimed that the class was “disastrous for the ego of most of them, stupid, illiterate, long-haired, hippie, Blake-ridden, Ginsberg-gullible…a lot of anxious and eager kids all wanting to hear they’re the greatest thing since, say, Charles Olson.”
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