SOURCE: "Seamus Heaney: Vindication of the Word 'Poet'," in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 242, No. 49, December 4, 1995, pp. 42-3.

[In the following essay, which is based on an interview with Heaney, Bing discusses the poet's early work and the ideas that led to his book, The Redress of Poetry.]

There is a Gaelic superstition still associated with Seamus Heaney's ancestral home in County Derry in Northern Ireland. According to Heaney, a St. Muredach O'Heney once presided over a monastic site affiliated with his family. It's said that if soil is dug from the ground of that site by a Heaney, it carries an aura of magic and beneficence.

Heaney, too, has an aura, if not a star power, shared by few contemporary poets, emanating as much from his leonine features and unpompous sense of civic responsibility as from the immediate accessibility of his lines. Since Robert Lowell dubbed Heaney "the most...