The youthful enthusiasm of two septuagenarian literary giants - Heaney and Schama - charmed their audiences at this week's Dublin Writers' Festival, reports FIONA MCCANN

WHEN HE TOOK to the stage at the National Concert Hall on Tuesday to open this year's Dublin Writers Festival, Seamus Heaney's may well have been the largest poetry reading ever to take place in a country that has never been short of such. Some 1,200 people had gathered to hear the Nobel laureate (left) in the year of his 70th birthday, despite his own admission that "these past months I've been 70 many, many times." In her fresh and touchingly personal introduction, Olivia O'Leary conjured the comparison of a child at a birthday party who has been showered with so many cakes and presents that there is a danger he might suffer from the excess. Yet Heaney, ever generous in his response to an audience that embraced him with evident ownership, has clearly averted the hazards of sugar overload, his humility and affecting grace still in evidence.

Though he confessed to nervousness as he stood alone on a stage surrounded by so many eager listeners, and faltered occasionally as he read, he brought what intimacy he could to a venue that seemed at odds with the notion.

"It's a big hall," he admitted, "and the poems I thought to be read here should be able to march out to the back of the hall." And so they did, beginning with a reading from his own translation of Beowulf, in which those gathered in the hall attend the minstrel even as they are surrounded by menace.

Heaney's listeners rejoiced as the words resounded from some 20 poems in all. Among them were old familiars - The Harvest Bow, St Kevin and the Blackbird, Postscript - alongside newer poems, such as Miracles (written, he explained, "after I had an episode"), Chanson D'Aventure and The Wood Road.

In his attempt to engage each member of his vast audience, he turned at one point to those seated behind the stage to face them as he read. There was humour in his reading, a charm undissipated by the huge space, and honesty in his anecdotes and explanations of the inspiration for each work he read.

Though this was not, perhaps, the perfect venue for Heaney's direct and personal magic, his words found their way to the individuals making up his audience, who left the reading "burnished by its passage, and still warm".

POETRY IS ALSO at the heart of Simon Schama's work, the celebrated historian revealed on Wednesday night in Liberty Hall Theatre. "My aims in writing history are poetic," he said, speaking of his desire to "bring people into the fantastic mess of human experience". In his lively, lucid presentation on the US past and present, this "fantastic mess" was expertly animated. Schama began with Barack Obama's reclamation of the brutal flipside of his country's past even as the new president invokes the high-minded aspirations of its founding fathers, then doubled back through the debate over war in Iraq and ended with footage of Schama's own visit to Gettysburg.

Schama was joined by Irish Times columnist Fintan O'Toole, who pointed to the writer's "radical technique" of employing a historic and journalistic viewpoint in his book, The American Future.

"It was a conscious decision," said Schama, adding that he had hoped to "register the burn of proximity and then sit back and contemplate." "Americans are super-saturated in historical reference all the time," he pointed out, but added that it was "a smiley-faced history" they were fed. It is this dangerous version of history that Obama challenges, according to a gleeful Schama, who managed to invoke Thucydides, Gore Vidal, a Wales history professor and Montgomery C Meigs as he leapt - almost literally, such was the energy of his presence - to the defence of American history.

"American history has been distorted by the delirium of rugged individualism," he explained to an audience he called his "class", encouraging their participation as he held their attention while racing off on tangents and back again. Expertly steered by O'Toole when his enthusiasm propelled him too far from a solicited answer, Schama's delivery was almost an illustration of the kind of American positivity he described, an upbeat Obama ovation as entertaining as it was elucidating.

After pacing the stage in patent runners, he admitted that "there is a restless 16-year-old in me that never quite goes away," his fingers clicking to the next big discovery, or "rock'n'roll record", that Schama explained, to a class spellbound by this teenage septuagenarian, was only ever an archive away.

Dublin Writers Festival ends on Sunday