Seamus Heaney Critical Essay | Nobel Prize in Literature

Critical Review by John Bayley

SOURCE: "Professing Poetry," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4829, October 20, 1995, pp. 9-10.

[In the following review of The Redress of Poetry, Bayley maintains that though Heaney's criticism is sound and fair, it offers no new startling insights.]

Seamus Heaney's slim book of offerings as Oxford Professor of Poetry gives the impression of being adjusted with courtly discretion to an audience who expect the familiar rather than the new. His most interesting essays are an introduction on the The Redress of Poetry, and its follow-up on Hero and Leander in an Irish context. Later pieces on MacDiarmid and Dylan Thomas, Brian Merriman and John Clare, are sound but conventional, as if Heaney as a poet can only be saying the proper things about other poets, as he does in passing about contemporaries like Holub, Brodsky and the Europeans. The poet as diplomat is an honourable and unusual role...
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