Seamus Heaney’s essays and interviews are an immediate pleasure. We are struck by the freshness and persuasiveness of his impressions: that reading Yeats’s poetry is like “getting on a bronze horse.”¹ That Elizabeth Bishop’s poetic tone “would not have disturbed the discreet undersong of conversation between strangers breakfasting at a seaside hotel” (GT 101). That when we read Christopher Marlowe, we are in “thrall to the poetic equivalent of a dynamo-hum,” a sound that “both exhilarates and empowers” (RP 29). That Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol” can sound like the “cry of Marsyas” but also, alas, like “the strings...

Reading his Foreword to Preoccupations, one could easily argue that Heaney’s move to Glanmore in 1972 was the occasion that gave rise to so much later theorizing on the nature and value of poetry. It was this event that prompted him to question his direction in becoming a full-time poet and man of letters. Heaney claims that in 1972 a quotation from Shakespeare’s sonnets was his daily rumination: “How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea / Whose action is no stronger than a flower?” (P 33). Even so, as Heaney himself knows, origins can be elusive. Heaney’s specific...

Seamus Heaney has written eloquently in the past decade about Yeats, suggesting several reasons why we should see Yeats as the greatest influence on his poetry after midcareer. Most prominently, Yeats is the focus of “Crediting Poetry,” Heaney’s Nobel Lecture of 1995, in which Yeats’s work is represented as embodying qualities of self-pleasing and realism that Heaney thinks essential to poetry. The Nobel Lecture also pays passing tribute to other poets who have influenced Heaney: Hopkins, Keats, Bishop, Owen, Lowell, Rilke, Mandelstam, MacLeish, and T. S. Eliot. Heaney associates Eliot’s influence with a single quality, which he encapsulates in the...

In an interview conducted by Irish America in 1986, Seamus Heaney tells the story of his first trip to the United States in 1969. At a party in New York a woman approached him and said, “Oh, you’re the poet here.” Heaney replied, “I’m supposed to be, yeah.” Heaney reports that the woman was puzzled and asked, “What?” Her response, Heaney later reflected, was an entirely American one and his reply entirely Irish. What he should have said, Heaney realized, was this: “Yes, I’ve published two books and I’m actually at work on a third one, and I got two...

The convergence of Seamus Heaney and Dante in Heaney’s midcareer was determined by several of Heaney’s needs and attitudes: by his aversion to the idea that he should, as an Ulster Catholic, be an “engaged” writer; by his need for a non-Irish Catholic authority; by his powerful sense of loyalty to the dead; by his admiration for the example set by his modern masters as occasional emulators of Dante; by his conviction that the poetry of someone in midcareer must originate in cultural detachment, out of what Heaney, following Dante, calls “the second life”; by his desire to become a...

In his memoir “Mossbawn,” published in Preoccupations, Seamus Heaney tells of a recurrent experience he had while growing up in County Derry. This memory and its retrieval anticipate Heaney’s poetry of the past fifteen years or so, especially Seeing Things (1991), and suggest a solution to a problem posed in much of Heaney’s critical writing in the past few decades, which concerns itself with finding a “place” for poetry:

I spent time in the throat of an old willow tree at the end of the farmyard. It was a hollow tree, with gnarled, spreading roots, a soft, perishing bark and...

In 1990 Heaney completed an essay entitled “Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin.” He gave this essay as a lecture in 1993 and it is collected in The Redress of Poetry (1995). The essay focuses on Larkin’s poem “Aubade,” which was first published in the Times Literary Supplement two days before Christmas 1977. As Heaney’s title makes clear, “Aubade” is about last things, and it is also one of Larkin’s last poems. But Heaney makes the poem representative of Larkin’s entire career and poetic stance, which he is at pains to...

In 1988 Seamus Heaney worked in the Main Reading Room of the National Library in Dublin on a selection of, and introduction to, Yeats’s poems for the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. By his account, it was a period of intense labor. “I had six weeks of a battened-down sense of being nose-to-the grindstone,” he recalls, but it was out of this labor, “with a sense of the weight lifted,” that the short, uniform, buoyant, and brilliant poems called “Squarings” were born, forming the central part of his collection Seeing Things (1991).¹

During that labor Heaney probably walked across...