Walcott and Heaney

In The Times, Andrew Billen talks to Nobel Prize-winning poets, Derk Walcott and Seamus Heaney about their collaboration on an operatic version of Heaney's The Burial At Thebes - Heaney write the libretto and Walcott directed for The Globe.

Had they felt like accomplices in the minority activity of versification. “Not really, no. When you meet other poets, that disappears. No paranoia, no sense of minority. Nothing like that,” Heaney said. “The other thing that brought us together was a sense of humour, mockery and that again is young poets’ stuff. And I think there was a sense of sharing and being at an ironical distance from, if you like, the English tradition of English literature and of English culture. Because I’m doing English in Belfast and he’s doing English in St Lucia and we both know English and the English and we’re not English ourselves.”