SOURCE: Bolton, Jonathan. “‘Customary Rhythms’: Seamus Heaney and the Rite of Poetry.” Papers on Language and Literature 37, no. 2 (spring 2001): 205-22.

In the following essay, Bolton analyzes the means and ends of Heaney's poetics, as exemplified by the structure and thematic concerns of what Bolton identifies as Heaney's “station poems.”

Ceremony's a name for the rich horn And custom for the spreading laurel tree. 

—W. B. Yeats, “A Prayer for My Daughter”

Near the conclusion of his Nobel Prize address, Crediting Poetry, Seamus Heaney speaks of two kinds of “adequacy” ascribable to poetry: “documentary adequacy” and “lyric adequacy.” The former has to do with the impact and emotive power of description and is as old as Homer's account of the Fall of Troy. “Even today, three thousand years later,” Heaney says, “as we channel surf over so much live coverage of contemporary savagery, highly informed but in danger of...