Voice of a silent tribe

Profile : Seamus Heaney The Nobel poet may be mellowing, but his anger endures, says Jan Dalley

When the news of Seamus Heaney's Nobel prize broke, last October, the Irish poet was away, out of touch with the world, on a Greek island. It was appropriate. For years now Heaney has balanced the demands of a very public life - his annual stint of teaching at Harvard, for instance - with reclusive withdrawal, usually to a cottage without a telephone near Dublin.

Fame is nothing new to Heaney. He comes from a country where poets are recognised in the street. Although he is still only 57, he has been a well-known figure in Ireland for 25 years or more, and famous to readers around the world for at least 15: in 1975 his fourth collection, North, which was followed in 1979 by Field Work, confirmed his standing as a world-class writer. And in that mysterious way that literary reputations grow, like mushrooms in the dark, it has become accepted over the past few years that he is probably the finest writer working in English today.

But the Nobel prize brought super-celebrity and a punishing round of foreign trips, invitations, honorary degrees and other awards.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this enormous reputation is that it is almost unanimously approving, both of Heaney the poet and Heaney the man. He is affable and charming, witty, generous with his attention: in a trade not known for its charitable remarks, friends and colleagues say he really is as nice as he seems.

On a professional level, his acclaim is also the product of hard work. He has been described as "his own best critic"; willing to discuss his work, reading, lecturing and talking tirelessly. Next month sees the publication of The Spirit Level, his ninth major collection of poems and the first since his Nobel prize, but there have also been anthologies, translations, reviews and articles, prose and lectures, and many years of teaching. He lectured in English at Queen's University, Belfast; he has taught since 1982 at Harvard and in 1994 he finished a five-year stint as Oxford Professor of Poetry.

All this writing and talk, this great and careful bonanza of words and poems, carried Heaney to the Nobel platform from a thatched farmstead in Mossbawn, Co Derry, where the family with its nine children crowded into three rooms. There, his powerful eloquence was formed against a background preoccupied with not speaking, with being unable to speak out. Words are dangerous in a riven community: just saying your name opens the door to a wave of ancient hatreds and allegiances, which explains "the famous/ Northern reticence, the tight gag of place/ And times" Heaney describes in a poem called "Whatever you say, say nothing". That had been his mother's advice to her children. In an interview of 1977 he was more specific still about the characteristics of his tribe: "The Catholics in the North aren't the 'typical Irish' - some noble wild-eyed figure with a great flow of eloquence and wit, with a kind of primitive energy about him, untrammelled in some way. My people were not like that at all. They were quiet, watchful, oblique, sly."

Aged 11, the young Seamus won a scholarship to St Columb's College, a Catholic boarding-school in Londonderry, and from there to Queen's University. He graduated in 1961 with a First in English and began to publish poems in local magazines and papers, prompted partly by the influence of Ted Hughes, his senior by nine years: "I remember the day I opened Ted Hughes's Lupercal in the Belfast Public Library. [There was] a poem called 'View of a Pig' and in my childhood we'd killed pigs on the farm, and I'd seen pigs shaved, hung up and so on... Suddenly, the matter of contemporary poetry was the material of my own life. I had had some notion that modern poetry was far beyond the likes of me... so I got this thrill out of trusting my own background, and I started a year later, I think."

By 1964 he had poems printed in the New Statesman and other periodicals, and in 1966 his first collection of poems, Death of a Naturalist, was published by Faber & Faber. Much is made of the fact that Heaney went to London to be published, but those in search of ironies might enjoy a subtler one: Charles Monteith, who took over Faber's poetry list from TS Eliot, was himself from Northern Ireland - a Protestant and committed Unionist. At Charles Monteith's memorial service last December, Heaney recalled the day in August 1965 - the day after his wedding to Marie Devlin, to whom he is still married - when he came to London to meet Monteith. He paid warm tribute to their long association, but even on such an occasion he referred to the political divide between them, and how their negotiation of difficult terrain, through mutual respect, was an image of what they both would want for the place they grew up in.

At this time, too, the first of Heaney's three children was born: he has two sons and a daughter. By the end of the Sixties, the Troubles had begun, and Heaney - after a year teaching in California - ended his 15 years of living in Belfast and moved south, to Co Wicklow. It was 1972, and Heaney has never returned to live in Ulster; in 1976 he made his home in Dublin.

The imprint of the North has never left him. The predicament of Northern Catholics, the strains of a double identity and fierce sense of tribal feeling have fired Heaney's work since the beginning. Delivering his Nobel lecture in December, he outlined the tensions that had faced the child in Derry: "ethical, aesthetical, moral, political, metrical, sceptical, cultural, topical, typical, post-colonial and, taken all together, simply impossible". The word "religious" is strikingly absent and so is the word "linguistic". For Heaney opened his speech by conjuring up a secluded childhood, "intimate, physical, creaturely", into which the outside world intruded only in an English accent, through the BBC news on the wireless. He shows us a little boy, perched on the arm of the old sofa with his ear glued to the set in the warm family racket around him, avid not just for news but for Dick Barton and Biggles. A poem in the new book takes a similar scene - the children chuffing and puffing as a "train" on the sofa, while on the wireless: "Here is the News,/ Said the absolute speaker. Between him and us/ A great gulf was fixed where pronunciation/ Reigned tyrannically". The notion of two languages - domestic versus formal, that of the oppressed and that of the oppressor - joins all the other doubles in this most contradictory of poets.

For Heaney is a man of many faces. The poet whose roots made his first books - Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark (1969) - "loud with the slap of the spade and sour with the stink of turned earth", as the TLS reviewer put it, is an ocean-hopper on the transatlantic academic and literary circuit, a political sophisticate who can glide with apparent ease between patrician Boston, the pomp of Oxford and the Republican passions of home. His immense charm is a kind of armour, the Northern steel just discernible under the warmth; he has a huge and generous smile that somehow makes you realise he might be able to make himself, big hefty man that he is, ubiquitous and invisible as the Cheshire Cat.

Most elusive is Heaney's exact political position. His sense of identity can be in no doubt, and the few occasions when the public affability slips are when he has reacted angrily to suggestions that he is any part of the mainstream British tradition. In Ireland, however, he has been accused of fence-sitting, and there he seems bound to be accused of too much radicalism, or not enough.

Looking back, though, it's clear that there were politics in every blade of grass, every inch of landscape. And as the Troubles increased, so Heaney evolved an ability to say the unsayable, to voice the pull between good liberal conscience and atavistic emotion.

Neither his courage nor his honesty have deserted him. If anything, he is more explicit now, when he tells in his Nobel lecture the story of "one particularly sweet-natured school friend" interned on suspicion of sectarian murder. "I shocked myself by thinking," Heaney admits, "that even if he were guilty, he might still be helping the future to be born, breaking the repressive forms and liberating new potential in the only way that worked, that is to say the violent way - which therefore became, by extension, the right way."

But he adds that this thought passed in a moment, replaced by the firmer belief that "the future we desire" was to be found in his other anecdote, of a moment of compassion between a Protestant and a Catholic in danger of death.

The mature Heaney can direct this unabashed gaze at violence and contradiction, but he has also begun to consider "the marvellous as well as the murderous". The title, The Spirit Level, suggests a more peaceful being, so it is in some ways good to know that this worldly, sweet-talking and ultra- level spirit can still display a burst of righteous anger against the long-suffering, the "having to abide/ Whatever we settled for and settled into/ Against our better judgement". Instead, he calls, "for Jesus' sake/ do me a favour, would you, just this once?/ Prophesy, give scandal, cast the stone."

Whatever you say, say nothing? We should be grateful Seamus Heaney did not obey his mother.