Discussed in this essay:

Aeneid Book VI: A New Verse Translation, by Seamus Heaney. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 112 pages. $23.

He was, to borrow Yeats’s phrase, the “smiling public man,” who sat with, and was quoted by, world leaders; the recipient of a Nobel and nearly every other prize; and the author of some of the most important and admired poetry of the past half-century. At the same time, he was a beloved father figure — an exemplar and encourager — to generations of Irish, British, and American poets and critics, not to mention writers, translators, and publishers in many…