What is the opposite of poetry? What slows the spark and puts sludge in the veins? What deadens the language? What rears up before you with livid and stupefying power-in the middle of the night, in the middle of the day-to make you feel like you'll never write a good line again?
This is Seamus Heaney in 1985, writing to his friend Barrie Cooke.
We see the poet, for example, first getting his hands on a copy of P. V. Glob's The Bog People, the book whose account of exhumed Iron Age bodies in Denmark would trigger "The Tollund Man" and, in time, half of the poems in North.
"This text which you propose ... it actually interferes with the way I possess my own generative ground and memories; is therefore potentially disabling to me in what I could still write."
And we see him ruing the difficulty of his commission to translate Beowulf, a daily wrangle with 'ingots of ...
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