Writers, according to Seamus Heaney, ‘live precisely at the intersection of the public and the private’. One of the most direct statements of a public nature in his own poetry occurs in his pamphlet, An Open Letter. This Burns-stanza poem was written as a polite protest – jocose but entirely in earnest – at finding himself categorised as ‘British’ in the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, an influential anthology in which his work was accorded pride of place. Pride of place of a different kind provoked this normally celebratory poet into refusing to raise his glass, as he insisted, ‘My passport’s green. / No glass of ours was ever raised / To toast The Queen’ (OL 9).

An Open Letter was published by the Field Day Theatre Company (of which Heaney was a director) in Derry, a city with nomenclatural problems of its own. Ideal as a platform for a public statement of this kind, Field Day proposed – through plays, pamphlets and anthologies – a re-examination of fundamental assumptions about culture and identity in Ireland. What Seamus Heaney wrote of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing applied to the work of the Company as a whole – it aimed ‘to reveal and confirm the existence of a continuous tradition, contributed to by all groups, sects and parties active in the island’s history, one in which a more generous and hospitable notion of Ireland’s cultural achievements will be evident’. Read in this spirit, An Open Letter avoids narrow nationalism by the very tone it adopts – temperate and tolerant rather than grimly chauvinistic. While an Ulster Unionist’s reading is likely to be coloured by Heaney’s choice of passport, the poet himself – in the last of his Oxford lectures – preferred to envisage the poem conferring dual citizenship: