“Oil, oil, oil,” wrote the Irish poet Seamus Heaney in early October, 2002: “Bush prefers to go to war than to raise the price of petrol.” America’s commander in chief had the previous month called the looming Operation Iraqi Freedom “a great moral cause, and a great strategic goal.” The effects of the illegal war, including the hundreds of thousands of dead, were yet to be realized. But some had a sense of it: “The Democrats are sheepish,” Heaney continued, “and there seems to be no realization or care that an American attack in Iraq will send recruitment for Al Qaeda sky high and create general Arab disaffection.” Over the next two decades, the poet’s righteous anger would be vindicated.

Heaney went on to contribute to a literary anthology in support of the Irish antiwar movement at a time when Shannon Airport was in regular use by the US military, despite Ireland’s vaunted neutrality. “I oppose this war with a mute passion, a pain of deep anxiety that cannot fiend coherent expression,” Brian Friel, the acclaimed dramatist, stated in his introduction to the volume, adding that there was “something indeed” about the American aggression that “offends the notion of what it is to be fully human.” “Courageous, clarifying stuff,” Heaney remarked enthusiastically to his friend in their subsequent correspondence, praising him for his eloquence, “full of rage, reasonableness and ‘nature’, as my mother would have called it.”

If the discernment was characteristic of Heaney, this was perhaps less true of the forthrightness and antagonistic tenor of his political positioning here. Known for his discretion and verbal finesse — his preference for well-worded nuance over declarative pugnacity in the stances he struck — for many years Heaney was the epitome of the public poet in Ireland: a quasi-bard, deftly able “to walk with Kings,” in the words of the imperialistic Rudyard Kipling, while retaining “the common touch.” Beloved by several generations of readers for the human depth and fluent craftsmanship of his poems, Heaney also had a permanent seat at the court of power. Bill Clinton is said to have named his pet dog “Seamus” in tribute to the writer whose company he enjoyed so well. Joe Biden continues to regale members of the voting public with unsolicited recitations of the poet’s work. (Such dubious presidential honors have yet to be bestowed on Adrienne Rich and Bertolt Brecht, firebrands to their core.) “There are different ways of doing things, at different times,” Heaney suggested late in life, when asked about the “art and politics topic” — “forever new and forever old” — adding that the “worst [is] to fake it, good or bad.” For the poet, it seems, the question of power and its redress was secondary to the more pressing and perennial preoccupation of artistic authenticity. As Heaney would discover, however, such concerns and pressures are often intertwined.