SOURCE: "Deeper than Declared: On Seamus Heaney," in Salmagundi, No. 80, Fall, 1988, pp. 22-57.

[Kinzie is an American poet, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt, she analyzes the imagery and syntax of Heaney's poetry, focusing on the epic poem, "Station Island."]

"Was there a 'misalliance,'" asks Seamus Heaney of Robert Lowell, "between the gift and the work it was harnessed to do?" [see Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978]. To ask the question is to suggest an affirmative reply: The vivid occasion in Lowell was ever straining toward meditation, the verbal breakdowns toward a state of Horatian health (and, one could say, vice versa). Heaney's sensitivity to this "misalliance" is revealing, since he, too, the best known poet to come out of Ireland since Yeats, hankers after a species of court dress and bardic intonation, for which almost everything in his unconscious music automatically disqualifies him. So, too, do Heaney's...