Heaney on Larkin
I found this in an article by Seamus Perry in the London Review of Books about a new book (by R. F. Foster) on Heaney ...
"In 1982 Heaney contributed a superb essay to Philip Larkin's sixtieth birthday celebrations about the way light floods into Larkin's poetry with a feeling of immense if inexplicable redemptiveness ..."
I think that sounds about right.
But I also loved this aside, about James Joyce and English ...
"Joyce wasn't remotely troubled, as Corkery was, by the thought that writing in the coloniser's language was a problem; on the contrary, he usually gives the impression that English had been twiddling its thumbs waiting for him to come along and make something of it."
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