Seamus Heaney's death hit the whole world hard. But his loss was felt most in Ireland – and best expressed there too, in some lovely, affectionate writing. Take Rosita Boland's report in the Irish Times from the interment in Bellaghy: "It was the most public of burials for the most private of men. Even in death, Seamus Heaney chose to be generous." Or savour the image in Heaney's The Given Note, read by Peter Fallon at the funeral – "For he had gone alone into the island / And brought back the whole thing." Heaney's death has been a national event, a tribute to the poet and to the way literature continues to infuse Irish life. A century ago on Saturday, WB Yeats published September 1913 – "Was it for this the wild geese spread /The grey wing upon every tide" – also in the Irish Times (and the paper still has a poetry editor). A nation is a culture, not just an economy, wrote Fintan O'Toole when Heaney died. Never more so than in Ireland this week.