SOURCE: Oser, Lee. Review of Electric Light, by Seamus Heaney. World Literature Today 76, no. 1 (winter 2002): 110-11.

In the following review, Oser offers a positive assessment of Electric Light.

Like all of Seamus Heaney's work, Electric Light owns up to a modernist inheritance. Anyone who argues that modernism is merely an extension of romantic poetry will not understand where Heaney starts or where he might lead us. It is not merely the case that Heaney adopts the form and diction of the High Modernists—Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Auden (as well as Robert Lowell, their immediate heir)—but that he partakes of their problems, most specifically the task of establishing a voice in the face of distinct conditions: coming late in a culture, being massively learned, being exposed to multiple pasts and violent histories, knowing many languages, and facing the withering self-consciousness of modern man. In the face...