SOURCE: Sen, Sudeep. Review of The Spirit Level, by Seamus Heaney. World Literature Today 70, no. 4 (autumn 1996): 963.

In the following review, Sen assesses the humanist impulses that inform The Spirit Level.

Seamus Heaney's collection The Spirit Level is his first book of poems to appear following his 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature (see WLT 70:2, pp. 253-66) as well as being the first book of verse in five years after Seeing Things (see WLT 67:1, p. 182). As an aside, it may be interesting to note that his new book was in fact written (and was with the publishers) well before he received the prize itself.

Hailed as the greatest Irish poet since Yeats, Heaney here shows once again that with subtle use of language, politics that is rooted in both the local and the universal, intelligence, humanism, and his love for nature, he can evoke in the reader feelings of immense transport...