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President Michael D Higgins has led the tributes to Seamus Deane, the leading Irish writer, critic and academic, who died last night, aged 81.
“The death of Seamus Deane is an incalculable loss to Irish critical writing, indeed Irish writing in general,” the President said, “as his passing represents not only the loss of a foremost critic but of a distinguished poet, novelist and internationally acclaimed university teacher.
“Seamus Deane’s contribution to critical and creative writing was delivered, not only at home in Ireland but in some of the most prestigious universities of the United States of America, be it Berkeley, Notre Dame, Indiana, Oregon. In such universities, news of Seamus Deane’s participation in a seminar immediately drew huge interest from scholars young and old, partly due, no doubt, to the sheer breath of the materials he would cover, but also due to the unique connection he would make between the life and the work.
“To Derry he leaves the incomparable legacy of the life, the writing, the concerns, the despair and the hope, that he shared with its people and to which so much of the work would respond.
“Few cities have a writer more embedded in its people, its history, its challenges, its hopes and its humour.
“There are, to me, parallels between Seamus Deane’s relationship to Derry and, in his time, Sean O’Casey’s relationship to Dublin in the way the full experience of its peoples are placed at the centre of the writing. All of the living is allowed its place.
“Seamus Deane was, too, a leading part of the great burst of intellectual revival that led to the Crane Bag, the Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature and many other innovations, which will be recalled as examples of the collaboration he had with his scholarly neighbours, and others, in giving a valuable affirmative to the importance and energy of Irish writing. When reasonably criticised for omission in a work he replied with the candour of a critic who had become himself the subject of a legitimate criticism. This was typical of the scholar in him.
“The price paid for a great talent, such as Seamus Deane had, was high and is revealed, I believe, in his work, including his fine novel, Reading in the Dark.
“That work too was delivered with a truth that combined the word, the place, the history, the lives, and the power of communal humour in the act of survival.
“All of this is put so well, for example, in his poem Derry, which opens with the lines:
The unemployment in our bones Erupting on our hands in stones
The thought of violence a relief, The act of violence a grief Our bitterness and love Hand in glove.
“Eternal peace be with our great writer and critic Seamus Deane. Sabina and I send our sympathies to his family, the people of Derry and his friends and former students at home and abroad. Siochán síoraí dá anam lách.”
Gerardine Meaney Anyone who was taught by Seamus Deane will remember not just the in-depth analysis of a key sentence that could last for half a lecture, but also the whirlwind tours of literature and philosophy that might take off from George Eliot and arrive at Muriel Spark by way of Edmund Burke.
He opened up vast intellectual horizons in the stuffy confines of UCD in the 1970s and ’80s. He had the great and rare gift as a research supervisor of giving his students the space to find their own way, allied with an ability to cross-examine critical evidence that would have done any barrister proud.
Alongside the brilliance, there was an abiding curiosity about new approaches and writers from which I benefited enormously at a time when Irish universities routinely discouraged PhD students in general and work on contemporary literature in particular.
The reaction to the under-representation of women overshadowed his editorial achievements in the Field Anthology of Irish Writing volumes 1-3, but it is exemplary of his intellectual integrity that he worked to redress this in commissioning two further volumes on women’s writings and traditions.
A hugely influential figure in the development of Irish literary studies and Irish culture, as well as a fine novelist and poet, Seamus Deane opened up a space for a whole generation of critics and writers.
Gerardine Meaney lectures in English at UCD
Fintan O’Toole When I went to UCD in 1975, one of the first lectures I attended was Seamus Deane on Robinson Crusoe. He paced back and forth across the platform, smoking and talking as if in a trance, language flowing from him and carrying along on its tide a great freight of ideas and insights. “Lecture” seemed like the wrong word for whatever it was he was doing. He wasn’t reading anything and he had no interest in standing at the podium and delivering precooked arguments. It was much more like being at an improvised performance with an edge of danger, an intellectual high-wire act.
As first impressions go, this was indeed a very accurate one. Oscar Wilde wrote an essay called The Critic as Artist and it might have been the general title for Seamus Deane’s career, except that one would also have to reverse it: the artist as critic. He was a poet before he was anything else and he wrote one of the great Irish novels of childhood, Reading in the Dark. But, also, that pacing back and forth was not just a physical tic. It expressed a restlessness that never left him alone, a coiled energy that generated a very particular combination of reflection and combativeness.
The combativeness could never be entirely disentangled from his background as a Catholic from the Bogside in Derry, ground zero of the Civil Rights movement. He was never going to be interested in arts for art’s sake. Even in the Field Day Theatre Company, of which he was a founder and director, there were tensions between his articulation of wide political ambitions and the reluctance of his friends and fellow directors Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney, to be entirely encompassed within them. The huge enterprise of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, a remarkable achievement of intellectual and physical organisation, was animated by a concern with ideas about the Irish colonial condition so narrowly focussed that he did not notice its almost complete exclusion of women’s experience. 
But it was never accurate to see him in any simple sense just as a nationalist writer responding to the Troubles. Much of his work was rooted in a disdain for the romantic ideas of Irishness that fuelled nationalism. He was passionately interested in Edmund Burke, in the French Enlightenment and in the way Britishness was formed in reaction to the French Revolution. And there was always in his writing that sense of a wonderful mind at work, ranging far, going to the edge, returning to home ground, pushing out again. Even to disagree with him was to be challenged and invigorated and that, surely, is the mark of a brilliant public intellectual.
Fintan O’Toole is an Irish Times columnist