After the death in 1998 of the poet laureate, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney quickly emerged as the people's choice to be his successor, her majesty's subjects having conveniently forgotten that, although born in Northern Ireland, Heaney had long since voted with his feet. As he memorably wrote to those who had forgotten, "Be advised that my passport is green".
The post of poet laureate is largely honorary and comes with a stipend of £30 a year and a case of wine in return for odes at times of dynastic moment. What it really represents, however, is public affection for the work and the man, an affection demonstrated earlier this week when, for the second time in four years, Heaney won the Whitbread Book of the Year award, with his reworking of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf.
Unlike the Forward Poetry Prize, or the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whitbread Book of the Year has nothing to do with the closely knit poetry industry but all to do with popular appeal. Only one of the nine judges was a poet.
So why do the English love Seamus Heaney? Firstly, as with Americans, there is no problem of class. He by-passes all those trip-up tests as to whether he should go in by the front door or the tradesman's entrance.
The fact of his being Northern Irish, said Michael Schmidt, author of Lives Of The Poets, a history of English language poetry, also put him in the right place at the right time. The English have always had a tendency to romanticise hardship and struggle, he believes, hence the popularity of east European poetry under communism.
"The ascendancy of Northern Irish poets in the 1960s and 1970s had a great deal to do with the Troubles. Somehow it was assumed the background was more serious than the humdrum post-war life in England. There was a kind of political interest in them. So Northern Irish poets, in particular, were watched for other than poetic reasons. The North of Ireland was sexy," Schmidt said.
At the time the coming man was Thomas Kinsella but, unlike communism, Ireland was personal. "Kinsella was so powerfully hostile against the English at the time of Bloody Sunday that he forfeited his English readership," Schmidt said. "Seamus Heaney was much more tactful and careful and began to occupy the ascendancy."
Heaney's ability not to make enemies had also helped to keep the pedestal from toppling. "The establishment like the fact that he is friendly to modernism, though he has never succumbed to it, and the general public like the fact that he's accessible," said Schmidt.
To the English, brought up on Wordsworth and Hardy, Heaney's poetry can be disarmingly familiar. Though whether they can hear the subversive undertones is another matter: in the discussions surrounding Beowulf in recent weeks, more attention has been paid to the parallels between Beowulf and Harry Potter than the parallels between Beowulf's fight against the agents of tyranny and the situation north of the Border. Like the colour of Heaney's passport, they just chose not to see it: Heaney is a winner so he must be one of us.
But even people who don't know their Motion from their Marvell like Heaney.
The English don't like pushiness and they don't like bull. They admire good speakers (you will never hear Seamus Heaney mutter, "Y'know" as he gropes for a word like other mortals); they value reticence and integrity and frankness, all of which Heaney has in spades. He is, in short, a good egg, a man who combines Irish brilliance with English restraint.
Like Ted Hughes before him, he's gone beyond being just a poet, Seamus Heaney is a star. Like Princess Diana, people think they know him, think they can just go up and talk to him, and they can and do. At a reading he gave recently to inaugurate a creative writing programme at the University of Manchester, Michael Schmidt remembers how Heaney could "talk to the tea ladies, talk to the students, talk to the professor and vice-chancellor without changing gear".
