SOURCE: Keen, Suzanne. “Catching the Heart Off Guard: The Generous Vision of Seamus Heaney.” Commonweal 123, no. 10 (17 May 1996): 10-14.

In the following essay, Keen applauds the tone and style of Heaney's poetics, highlighting its links to the oral traditions of poetry.

Seamus Heaney in the college cafeteria line at Harvard: The woman serving holds her scoop aloft. “Pasta or potatoes?” she asks. “Surely, you're joking,” says Heaney, and pokes his plate under the sneeze-guard for the potatoes.

In “Digging,” the best-known poem of his first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), Heaney declares his distance from men like his father and grandfather, men who “could handle a spade” and “scatter new potatoes,” choosing instead to follow the poet's vocation: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I'll dig with it.” His successes have carried him far from the Northern Ireland of his childhood, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for...