By the time he won the Nobel Prize in 1995, Heaney was clearly frustrated by the exigencies of his status, a major aspect of which was the answering of letters. Increasingly he operated in what he brilliantly called the “executive part of my being”.

This is just one lucid phrase of so many in the volume. After having shot to early fame after Faber & Faber published his first volume, Death Of A Naturalist, in 1966, Heaney was continually called upon to be a kind of mascot for the Republican cause in an era of devastating local bloodshed. Navigating such dangerous waters by resisting the call to be a political mouthpiece, he continued instead to quarry his own grounded habitat of memory and word-music, declaring that as a poet he had “a disposition, rather than a position”.

The flak he received was considerable, but his own personal anxieties notwithstanding, such lucidities as he had access to always seemed to measure up via a deeply human logic. And, as the flashpoints of the Troubles attenuated themselves through the ’80s and ’90s, Heaney, now living in Dublin and teaching at Harvard for nearly half of every year, developed into a unifying figure. The percussive acoustics of his work and the profoundly sensory dialects of feeling it summoned were proof of his view of the poet as a speaker for all times, if not all peoples.

There will always be those who disagree, of course. I met a man at a party in Melbourne during the 1980s who was in exile from Ireland after having performed certain duties for the IRA that made his migration necessary. When I mentioned Heaney to him in conversation, he said, in a loquacious Northern burr not dissimilair to the poet’s own: “Seamus Heaney. Too many f-----n’ manners for my liking.”

This, I might add, was in the same city where as an insouciant teenager I was once kicked out of a party by the host – a poet and former colleague of Heaney’s at Harvard – whose parting shot was to tell me that it was a shame I did not have the impeccable manners of my “hero”, Seamus Heaney.

You can see the kind of pressure of expectation the man’s gift put him under, even at the other end of the world. The letters leave us in no doubt that his was a gift he was both honoured and burdened by, and his handling of the balances – he might even say “squarings” – between the heft and sluice of his own inner music and his sense of what was humanely proper in a social sense is a continuous feature here.

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The book, however, is long, and given that Heaney’s 500-page interview about his work with Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, is already available to us, one wonders if some of the more mannerly apologies he makes for the tardiness of his replies could have been cut. Still, his courteous example is a fine one, and his loyal defence of friends under siege, particularly Ted Hughes, reminds us that his geniality was always underset by a fierce passion. Like Yeats, he knew the dangers of “a fanatic heart” and it was his great role in Irish literature to show how loyalty to the deeper self is in the end the best thing for the land.

As I was reading the letters, I had a farewell call from a dear friend who sadly, as it turned out, died the very next day. He was surprised, he told me, that after a lifetime of chaos, he felt at peace and ready to go to whatever came next. His only concern, he said, was that he die well for the sake of his children. I told him I had a sense of how important that was, and without wanting to put further pressure on him, told him the story of the poet’s death.

Despite the fame that came with Heaney’s body of work, he is by many people best remembered for the words he texted to his wife Marie just minutes before he died. She was at his bedside, but his illness meant he could no longer speak. Noli timere, he texted on his phone. Don’t be afraid. The phrase doesn’t really count as a full poetic line, but the deep grace of its utterance is, in the end, a measure of both the poet and the man.

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