SOURCE: "Canticle to the Earth: Theodore Roethke," in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980, pp. 190-94.
Heaney is widely considered Ireland's most accomplished contemporary poet and has often been called the greatest Irish poet since William Butler Yeats. In the following essay, which was first published in 1968, Heaney praises Roethke for adhering to his own instincts as a poet and characterizes his poetry at various stages in his career.
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