Seamus Heaney’s Second Life

On 29 August 2013, the day before Seamus Heaney died unexpectedly in Dublin, shocking into deep grieving not only the Irish world but also the global literary community and his vast legion of readers, I read a notice in the London Review of Books for a lecture he was scheduled to deliver at London’s Southbank Centre in November. The title of the lecture was advertised as ‘The Second Life of Art’. Perhaps he intended to engage with ideas advanced in an essay of that same title by Italian belletrist and fellow Nobel Laureate Eugenio Montale, though I would not presume to guess at the substance of that engagement.