SOURCE: Allen, Michael. “The Parish and the Dream: Heaney and America, 1969-1987.” Southern Review 31, no. 3 (July 1995): 726-38.

In the following essay, Allen traces the effect of American literature and culture on Heaney's poetry.

“Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.” So wrote Larkin, who had left Ireland for England, “home,” in 1955. The implied aesthetic is akin to (and roughly contemporaneous with) Kavanagh's assumption that creative potential has its tap-root in the “parish” of one's deepest allegiance. But despite Kavanagh's importance for Seamus Heaney's art, such local attachments were no longer a crucial spur for Heaney's generation of Irish poets. When Longley, Mahon, and Heaney first read together in the mid-'60s (in Glengormley, Mahon's “home ground”), they were celebrating a poet, MacNeice, for whom all places were potentially elsewhere. Robert Frost and Theodore Roethke (as well as Ted Hughes) show, through their influence on Heaney's early work, that he...