SOURCE: "Description as Poetry," in Kenyon Review, Vol. XXIX, No. 1, January, 1967, pp. 140-46.

In the following excerpt, Galler explores the expository nature of Heaney's poems in Death of a Naturalist.

Description—the details of what is being observed or performed—is the basis of all writing: epic, narrative, dramatic, or lyric. And this is the case whether the mind works through the eye directly or behind the eye by the various methods of analogy. But prior to this century poetry was not made of the kind of description that permits the reader no leap whatever to a plane of experience related to but more complete than that which is being observed. What has happened in this century increasingly, and in America especially, is the trend toward description replete with exposition, but lacking complication….

Death of a Naturalist, Seamus Heaney's interesting first book, is made up of description whichremains...