The morning that The Irish Times Literature Prizes were announced, David Hanly asked Seamus Heaney a question on Morning Ireland that has bothered him since. Given that, as he puts it himself, his "appetite for prizes has been appeased", should he not leave the field clear for those who still need to be fed with honours? Since Hanly raised the subject, it has bothered him a bit that other poets might have more need for affirmation than the 1995 Nobel laureate does.
It is not that The Irish Times prize means nothing to him. "Since it's at home in Ireland, I feel it's a special award and it means a lot to me. But when the shortlist came out, I also thought it would mean a lot to me if Medbh McGuckian, who was one time a student of mine, or Paul Durcan who is a completely achieved artist, got it."
But he still feels that to withdraw from the field would be to break ranks with his peers. "I would have thought that to leave oneself out of contention would be to leave the collective. Writers are a system of energy of some sort. They're an ecology. And to withdraw from it would therefore be in some sense improper. In the end, we poets aren't in competition, we're all delivering goods."
The way he hovers over an issue like this is emblematic of the way, over the 30-odd years of poetry celebrated in his award-winning collection, Opened Ground, Seamus Heaney has delivered his own particular goods. His body of work is a series of movements between the individual and the collective, the private and the public, the language that is special to his own voice and the common calling of poetry that he shares, not just with his contemporaries, but with the great poets of all times and places.
In his programme note for Deborah Warner's recent Dublin Theatre Festival production of Janacek's song-cycle, Diary of One Who Vanished, for which he wrote a new translation of the text, Heaney writes that in the end, "I could only write for my own ear, which is partly tuned to the register of my original County Derry voice and partly to the demands of English versecraft."
His voice, in other words, comes to us in stereo, one channel issuing from an Irish, Catholic, nationalist background, the other from the English language in its most formal, heavily laden guise. In moving between those registers, and in finding ways to blend them into a personal note, he has managed to be true both to the small community of Ireland and to the larger community of poetry itself.
It is, he acknowledges, "quite true that that sense of being in two places at once has caused the tension and the energy" that drive his work. He grew up, after all, in a culture not quite at home with the language in which he would articulate himself so extraordinarily.
"When I was in my teens and early twenties," he recalls, "I was in a school situation, and a political situation, where Irish was the preferred language. When I played as a schoolboy and as an undergraduate, I didn't play in the university dramatic society. I played in the GAA dramatic society in Bellaghy. So one world, the world of the hearth culture, if you like, was a sub-culture of Irish to which you had loyalty. And the other, through the scholarship life, was that to which you aspired. So there was always that tension. And it's still there. It's in Ireland. It's part of our story."
Yet in a way Shakespeare was as native to Bellaghy as Raftery or O Bruadair could ever be. In a long sequence of poems he wrote recently about doing Shakespeare plays at school, Heaney reflected on the inadequacy of a crude colonial framework for reading the experience of a Catholic kid in rural Derry putting on Macbeth or The Tem- pest. "On the one hand you can do the reading that says you were force-fed colonial matter and you became a good little subject of the English language by acknowledging Shakespeare and that he was part of the cultural clinching of the power situation.
"That's one truth, all right. But there is the second truth, which is that there's some form of transformation or radiance. Admittedly, he's a cultural icon and part of the hegemony and so on. But there's also the extra-ness that comes just from going into a school play and seeing yourself and your companions all for the moment carried away. There was an element of enlightenment, bringing light into your life. So, is Shakespeare an imposition and a stealthy political infiltration, or is he a radiant transformer? Surely both."
He sometimes worries that contemporary Ireland might be over-reacting to the cultural anxiety that comes from this mixed and complex heritage by merely reversing the kind of reaction that was dominant a century ago. Back then, we tried to simplify things by running away from the English part of our culture. Now, perhaps, we seek simplicity in an evasion of the Irish part. "The anxiety is expressing itself in diametrically opposed ways . . . 1890s back to Aran, 1990s overfly Ireland."
On the whole, Seamus Heaney tends to think that the creative tension will remain in force. "The see-saw is always going to be there. Maybe globalisation is going to render it a slightly obsolete anxiety. But I don't think so.
"Years ago, I was up in County Monaghan in the Nuremore Hotel and these questioning or despairing thoughts were in my mind as I was being kept awake by the disco at two in the morning, thinking God, everything is gone, everything is eroded, there's nothing but the same thing from Tennessee to Nuremore. And then as I came out of the hotel, I heard this country accent and I thought this is ineradicable. This can survive a lot of acculturation."
The tension between English and Irish cultures is, of course, far more than a concern of poets. But Heaney's journey has its own significance for the wider political world in which these tensions cost lives.
His most recent work, a new translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf, is a marvellous feat of form and language. But it is also a wonderfully free exercise in eluding the apparently fixed cultural categories. Beowulf is the fountainhead of English tradition but Heaney construes it in the voice of County Derry farmers, relatives of his father, the Scullions, effecting a kind of imaginative reconciliation between his native world and the British past.
That gesture is part of the escape from the English-Irish dichotomy that has given a new freedom to his work and that, in turn, derives in part from the peace process in Northern Ireland. He feels that, in people's heads, that process started long before the Belfast Agreement.
"I think that imaginatively the Northern Ireland situation was comprehended a long time ago. People are living with two realities and even now the politicians in the actual day-to-day life are living with two realities fairly adequately.
"One is that we know this thing is never quite going to be settled as it is meant to be in the documents because of the dream-realisations that each side has of the nature of the other. So that dream-knowledge is there. But there is also an administrative knowledge or a moral knowledge that turned itself into the Belfast Agreement and that is good enough to be going on with. In people's hardline, intimate group-talk among themselves, republicans will not yield and unionists will not yield. But, in that administering language, something has changed.
"In a way, it's imaginatively over. You get a sense of that in the writers in the North. Somebody like Medbh McGuckian or Paul Muldoon or Ciaran Carson, they're saying `Okay, the game is about winning, but it's also about what you can do with the ball.
"Personally I have felt freed in that way for a good while. I would say that I was in thrall to some kind of correctness until the mid-1980s. The danger for writers getting older is that they can do certain things. And you look at the work and say I can do this, but is it just doing it again or is there something new being done here? And it's injecting excitement, or irresponsibility, or new material that matters.
"Every now and again you get a subject that opens into a whole set of subjects. But for me it has always been a matter of waiting for an occasion of poetry, an occasion of lines that opens you up and wakens you up. And I think all poets survive perilously by what occurs. It cannot be summoned. You just wait for verification within your own sense of what's true."
Opened Ground is published by Faber