[This entry was updated by Robert Buttel from his entry in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 142-165.]
From the beginning critical as well as popular acclaim has greeted each volume of Seamus Heaney's poetry. Who would have predicted in 1966, when his first full-length book appeared, the impact such poetry would have? It is, after all, a poetry manifestly regional and largely rural in subject matter and traditional in structure—a poetry that appears to be a deliberate step back into a premodernist world of Wordsworth and John Clare and to represent a rejection of most contemporary poetic fashions.
Indeed, Anthony Thwaite's generally favorable review in the New Statesman (27 June 1969) of Door into the Dark (1969), Heaney's second volume, points with dry irony to the notion of retrogression: "Turbines and pylons for the 1930s: bulls for the 1960s. It's an odd progression." Perhaps, though, it is this very sense of return to a natural world and traditional forms that explains the popular response to Heaney's work (sales for each of the volumes have ranged from 15,000 to 30,000).
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