Seamus Heaney on Dante, Eliot, and Mandelstam
In Seamus Heaney’s long poem sequence “Station Island,” the speaker, on a pilgrimage, is visited by ghosts who rebuke him in an almost Dickensian fashion. “Part XII”, the final poem of the sequence, rouses me like a bugle call: Then I knew him in the flesh out there on the tarmac among the cars, wintered …