SOURCE: "Crossed Pieties," in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Vol. XI, No. 2, Spring-Summer, 1984, pp. 336-48.

In the following review of Heaney's two volumes of collected poetry and prose, Shapiro relates the stylistic and thematic development of Heaney's poetry to his assertion of personal and national identity.

There's an old Gaelic poem which goes, "Who ever heard/ Such a sight unsung/ As a severed head/ With a grafted tongue." This image—of a culture severed from the body of its own traditions and forced to speak another language—indicates the profound dilemma facing every Anglo-Irish poet fated to discover and express in English, the oppressor's tongue, his personal and national identity. One might even say that this identity resides, if anywhere, in the hyphen separating the Anglo from the Irish. Pulled in one direction by the English literary tradition, pulled in another by a social and political tradition which continues...