The death of Helen Vendler, Porter University Professor emerita, on April 23, deprived readers of perhaps the greatest American critic of poetry. The arrival days later of the enormous galley of The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $40), was a happy reminder of the warm friendship between the two. Heaney, Litt.D. ’98, a Nobel laureate who served as Boylston professor from 1985 to 1997 (he died in 2013), loomed large on campus, but a more intimate figure emerges from his letters to Vendler about her Seamus Heaney, interpreting his art. I am all atingle with the seraphic—your own word of approbation that slew me altogether—quality of your writing.