When Seamus Heaney was asked to address a conference in Delphi on 'The Greek Experience', Mrs Pary Spinou, a journalist with Eleftherotypia, invited him to answer some questions about his personal 'Greek experience' (and other things) as the basis for an interview. Peter Jones, here at Friends of Classics, was sent a copy by Mr Heaney. Here are the questions and his (faxed) answers, sent on January 13 2004:

Was the 'Greek experience' a coincidence for you, or a conscious choice? Did it choose you or you choose it?
HEANEY: In my case, 'The Greek Experience', as it is called, was a gradual process. Slowly I became part of it and it became part of me, but in the end its value to me as a writer has been inestimable. Inevitably, as somebody who received a traditional grammar school education, I was introduced early on to the most famous myths and masterpieces of the classical age. Unfortunately, however, I didn't study Ancient Greek - I did Latin, but over the years I gravitated past Rome towards Hellas. Rome is for the imperialists, I suppose, whereas Greece is for the independents. When I think of Rome these days, I see a military triumph on the Via Appia, the legions and the captives on display. When I think of Athens, I think of the Sacred Way, the procession from the Parthenon to Eleusis. Even so, I realize that the Greeks were capable of their own military campaigns and devastations.

In which of our ancient stories and persons do you identify yourself and your 'Irish experience'?
HEANEY: Hermes, for example, means a lot to me personally. For a long time I have associated him with my father. Hermes was the god off crossroads and market-places, he appears with his stick and his hat and his sandals and in this way he stands in my imagination for my father. My father was a farmer, but his real calling was the cattle trade. He was always going to cattle fairs, with his polished leather boots and his broad hat and his cane stick or ash plant [Ash plant = a rod cut from an ash tree and carried by cattle drovers]. And because of that farming background, there's another figure who has special private significance for me, namely the poet Hesiod. The muses sang to Hesiod on his farm on Mount Helicon and I associate this moment in the life of a rural bard with the arrival of poetry in my own life. I too am a farmer's son whose life was changed by the gift of poems. But more important than these personal images are the big mythic works such as The Oresteia, which covers the whole civilization-shift from a system of bloody vengeance to a system of instituted civic law. Obviously that process is related to 'the peace process', as we call it Northern Ireland - the hope that we can move from a sectarian, clannish society to a more civic, power-sharing system, based on respect for individual rights. And because of those concerns, of course, Antigone has also been a much translated play in Ireland: in it you can watch the conflict between the respecters of civil rights and the enforcers of law and order, so much so that it has become one of our most cited texts... I could go on... I love the figure of the Watchman in the Agamemnon, for example, who seems to me the representative of a certain kind of writer during a time of political crisis - Seferis, for example, during the time of 'The Colonels'. Or myself during the worst of our own troubles: implicated but not an activist, dumb but wanting to speak if only the right words could be found. After the IRA announced their ceasefire in 1994, I even did a sequence of poems in the Watchman's voice.

Greeks and Irish are people with different culture, roots, religion, but you connected the 'Greek experience' with the 'Irish experience'. What connects and what divides both of us?
HEANEY: There's this much in common between Greece and Ireland: in each case, the face of the country is entirely modern, it has its built up modern cities and its landscape transformed by twentieth century buildings and communications, but at the same time there are traces everywhere of an ancient vanished civilization. Your Greek inheritance has vastly more cultural importance and has exerted world-wide influence, but even so, in both Greece and in Ireland, people feel a connection and at the same time a separation between themselves and that older inheritance. I suspect that a modern Greek teenager at Delphi or Mycenae would feel much, the same as a modem Irish teenager would feel at the ancient site of Tara or at the megalithic tombs in the Boyne valley. Vague gratitude that he or she has sprung from such a depth of history but no great sense of destiny arising from that. It requires a certain amount of education, I suppose, a certain orientation of mind, to connect heritage with a vision of the present and the future.

Some time ago we had what we called a creative 'Greekness', works that are based on the Greek identity (e.g. Seferis). Can something like this exist in the times of globalization?
HEANEY: Creative work based on the home ground of your country is as necessary now in the days of globalization as ever it was. Especially in poetry, which is almost always a domestic art, no matter how outgoing and 'international' it may also happen to be. Seferis's 'Mythistorema', for example, or his poems set in Cyprus: are they 'global' or 'local'? Is Cavafy global or local? Is he old-fashioned because he is concerned with the ancient world of Hellas? No way. Is he national or international? Both.

Greeks and Irish have in common, in their recent history, their civil wars. We have managed to heal our wounds; you, not yet. Do you believe that there will soon be a solution?
HEANEY: Well, as a matter of fact, the analogy should not be with the Northern Ireland situation, which is as much a British as it is an Irish problem (and historically a British invention). It should be with the Irish Civil War, fought in the 1920s after the British left and the Irish Free State was set up. Blood was spilled then between two sides: there were those who thought that partial independence of the country was the best that could be gained and who therefore supported The Treaty that guaranteed it; and there were the hard-line Republicans who thought that the Free State which the leadership had negotiated was a betrayal of the Republican ideal. The wounds of that civil war have healed. But the Northern Ireland situation is not one of civil war, it's more a kind of festering 'colonialism within' - within Britain, mind you, because as long as Britain remains in charge of that part of the country, the problem is as British as it is Irish. The signs are that conditions will improve in the long run, although I have to emphasize that phrase, 'in the long run'.

In recent years, the US government decided to invade Iraq, Afghanistan and ex-Yugoslavia, showing its arrogance and power. Do you think that the US President acts like a modern Agamemnon?
HEANEY: I think he's more like a modern Creon. And I think that a great proportion of the United States population are like the Chorus in Antigone: afraid they'll be accused of being unpatriotic if they criticize the regime. It's as if they're collaborators rather than citizens in their own country. Creon, remember, employed the Bush tactic of creating an either/or world. 'Either you are for me or against me,' he said. 'Antigone has broken the law. What have you to say to that?' In a similar fashion, Bush has steamrolled the American electorate, and much of the rest of the world, very successfully.

During the invasion of Iraq we did not hear many voices from the intellectuals. Is their work alone sufficient? Are their voices strong enough? Is there something else they can do?
HEANEY: What intellectuals have to do is to be true to themselves, honest with themselves and with others. We have come to associate the committed intellectual with left wing causes, and there are shining examples of that all throughout the last century. Camus, for example. I like what Tzvetan Todorov said recently on this subject, asking that intellectuals be 'responsible' rather than 'committed'. This wasn't just a play on words, rather it was a demand that they should 'maintain a consistency between their words and their actions'. But I agree, that still does not absolve them from the need to speak truth to power.

In our times when people spend so much time with TV and the internet, do they have the interest and time to read poetry? Many people believe that it is difficult to read poetry. Can everyone understand the meaning of a good poem, or is a skill necessary?
HEANEY: The word poetry covers a multitude of experiences, and refers to vastly different levels of artistic achievement. Everybody is capable of responding to poems that have immediate appeal because of their melody or their wisdom or a combination of both. There are childhood rhymes which have pure poetic power, there are famous single lines which hold meaning for whole populations, so yes, it's possible to say that even in the age of the visual image, the cineplex and the internet, poetry is available to all comers. Poetry considered in that way is a matter of ad hoc, one-off, hit or miss pleasure. But, there is another way to consider poetry, as a deeply rooted highly developed order of understanding, depending on allusion and echo, and appreciation at that level requires a special tuning of the ear and a special schooling of the memory. If you're serious about the art, you have to be ready to learn and keep learning. Still, there is one important thing to say about poetry: you don't need to know a lot of it for it to have value and meaning in your life or the life of your society. Two or three poems, even two or three bits of poems, known by heart and genuinely cherished can stand everybody in good stead.

Best wishes,

Seamus Heaney