In the following essay, Hart determines the influence of Robert Lowell on the poems of Field Work, and praises Heaney's willingness to take risks in this volume.

In the following essay, Boly applies speech act theory to construct multiple modes of meaning and layers of reality for the main persona in Heaney's poem “Follower.”

In the following interview, Heaney discusses his poetry, especially the poems in The Haw Lantern, as well as American poets that have influenced his work.

In the following excerpt, Burris places Heaney's poetry within the context of pastoral tradition.

In the following prize-winning essay, Hart analyzes the opposing, yet interwoven themes of Heaney's poetry, maintaining that the poet finds "precedents in a tradition of Catholic meditation but give to the old forms a new complexity and an attractive, personal finish."

In the following excerpt, Zoutenbier traces the thematic and stylistic development of Heaney's verse.

In the following review, Howe singles out the humanity and energy of the narrative speeches in Heaney's translation of Beowulf, but concedes that Heaney's use of Ulster idiom is inappropriate since he does not fully re-invent the tale in terms of Anglo-Irish relations.

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.”

In the following essay, Pratt provides an overview of Heaney's life and career through his 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.

[Kinzie is an American poet, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt, she analyzes the imagery and syntax of Heaney's poetry, focusing on the epic poem, "Station Island."]

In the following excerpt from the full-length study of Heaney's work, Buttel examines the seminal influences on Heaney's early poetry.

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

In the following essay, Quinlan examines Heaney's background as a Catholic native of Northern Ireland, outlining how changes in his life and philosophies affected his poetry.

In the following review of Heaney's two volumes of collected poetry and prose, Shapiro relates the stylistic and thematic development of Heaney's poetry to his assertion of personal and national identity.

In the following favorable review, Vendler explores the defining characteristics of the poems compiled in The Haw Lantern, asserting that the volume is an expression of the natural loss of middle-age.

In the following excerpt, Vendler examines the major themes of Heaney's Station Island.

[Hart is an American critic and educator. In the following essay, his introduction to Seamus Heaney, he examines Heaney's development as a poet, focusing on his position in—and his reactions to—Ireland's literary and political history.]

In the following essay, Atfield offers a Jungian interpretation of the poetry found in the volume Seeing Things.

In the following interview, Heaney discusses his writing habits, the origin of Sweeney Astray, and the work of other contemporary poets.

In the following essay, Deane connects the political aspects of Heaney's poetry with definitions of Ireland as both cultural and geographic entities.

In the following review, Shippey objects to Heaney's use of Irish words derived from Anglo-Saxon, but unfamiliar to most English speakers, in his translation of Beowulf.

North is a major accomplishment, a book-length sequence of lyrics which exploits the metaphor of possession more fully than any other Irish poet has done. The poems are richly autobiographical, yet [Seamus Heaney] consistently weaves the particulars of his life into a mythic frame; he has evolved a unique species of political poetry which refers at once to the current Irish "troubles" and to the human situation generally. One would have to invoke Pablo Neruda's Heights of Macchu Picchu ...

In the following essay, Tillinghast assesses the political and artistic implications of the poems in Station Island and North.

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

In the following review, Murphy evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Heaney's translation of Beowulf.

In the following review, Moldaw contrasts the subject matter of Heaney's earlier works with that of Seeing Things and Selected Poems, noting a shift from materiality to abstraction.

[In the following essay, which is based on an interview with Heaney, Bing discusses the poet's early work and the ideas that led to his book, The Redress of Poetry.]

[In the following interview, Heaney discusses his philosophy of language and the influence his father and his home in Ireland have had on his poetry.]

In the following mixed review, Logan faults Heaney for writing "poems" instead of poetry, asserting that the poems in Seeing Things lack passion and instinct.

In the following review, Mangan praises Heaney's impeccable pairing of words to things and his ability to elevate poetry to the level of myth or religion in Electric Light.

In the following essay, Pinsky provides a favorable review of Heaney's Seeing Things.

In the following review, Desmond outlines Heaney's career through the poems in Opened Ground.

In the following essay, Bidwell draws a connection between Heaney's metaphor of the bog and Irish republicanism.

In the following review, Newey offers a negative assessment of Electric Light, noting that “the compressed textures of the language tak[es primacy over just about everything else.”]

In the following review, Mariani celebrates the influence of both famous and non-famous authors on the poems in Electric Light.

It is a mistake … to think of Heaney as merely a descriptive poet, endowed with unusual powers of observation. From the first his involvement with landscape and locale, with the physical world, has been both more personal and more remarkable in its implications than any mere act of observation and record could be. (p. 173) For Heaney, the natural world must be accepted for what it is—heavy, palpable in its irrefutable bulk, in its almost intractable forms. He paints it in thick oils, rarely al...

Heaney has in abundance a gift which the English distrust in one another but expect of the Irish: a fine way with the language. What in Brendan Behan, for instance, was a brilliant, boozy gift of the gab is transformed by Heaney into rich and sonorous rhetoric. He is a man besotted with words and, like all lovers, he wants to display the beauties and range and subtleties of his beloved. Unlike most, however, he disciplines his passion, reining it in for better effect. It is an admirable procedure, although ...

The difficulty that poets face in negotiating between the local and the universal, between a wish to be true to one's place and cultural heritage and a desire to create an art that will reach beyond the confines of locality, particularly troubles Irish poets, writing, as they do, out of an especially singular culture and writing for an audience largely estranged from that culture. Yeats, of course, provides the most obvious example of an Irish poet able to reach from the particular to the transcenden...

[In the following review of The Redress of Poetry, Bayley maintains that though Heaney's criticism is sound and fair, it offers no new startling insights.]

Seamus Heaney … has learned his trade so well that it is now a second nature wonderfully responsive to his first. And the proof is in "Field Work," a superb book, the most eloquent and far-reaching book he has written, a perennial poetry offered at a time when many of us have despaired of seeing such a thing. Heaney published his first book of poems, "Death of a Naturalist," in 1966. It was a book of promise, and of promises made mostly to his father, family, race and coun...

[In the following article, Grimes summarizes Heaney's life and career.]

I would not say that the Northern Ireland poet Seamus Heaney, at forty, has printed any single poem necessarily as fine as [Yeats's] "Adam's Curse", but the lyric called "The Harvest Bow" in Field Work may yet seem that strong against all of time's revenges. There are other poems in Field Work worthy of comparison to the Yeats of In the Seven Woods (1904), and it begins to seem not far-fetched to wonder how remarkable a poet Heaney may yet become, if he can c...

In the following review, Pratt champions Heaney's fresh approach to the language of Beowulf.

[In the following article, Clarity reports Heaney's reactions to winning the Nobel Prize.]

In the following review, Pratt highlights the influence of Ireland and Irish culture in the poems of Opened Ground.

In the following review, Glover offers a positive assessment of Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, noting that Heaney's poetry and criticism “has helped to keep the craft of poetry on the right, tight track.”

In the following excerpt, Shetley enthuses about Heaney's “sensitive” perspective on contemporary poetics in The Redress of Poetry.

In the following review, Campbell praises Heaney for making Beowulf accessible to twenty-first-century students, using his verses as a bridge between the original text and modern English.

In the following review, Pratt criticizes Heaney's overemphasis on politics in The Redress of Poetry.

In the following excerpt, Hosmer assesses the style and theme of The Spirit Level.

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

The first six pieces in [Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978], all quite short, form an untitled section on their own, though three are headed "Mossbawn" and three "Belfast". They are all, in the best sense, self-centred—informal circumstantial sketches of [Heaney's] upbringing in Co Derry, his childhood reading and absorption of "rhymes", his literary apprenticeship as an undergraduate at Queen's …, and a laconic Christmas 19...

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

In the following review, Taylor appreciates Heaney's examination of the past in Electric Light, but laments the poet's apparent emotional distance from his subjects.

Geographically [Heaney's] landscape [in Wintering Out] is still the Irish countryside, past or present…. Sometimes the countryside is seen, dramatically, through the eyes of others, not very human others and one of them an outright mermaid, who returns to the sea wrapped in the smoke-reeks, straw-musts and films of mildew from the thatch of her lover's house…. As to metaphorical landscapes, there is little in this book, apart from the prefatory poem, which deals specifically with...

The strengths and limitations of poet-critics, as a class, seem to come from intensity of focus: They need to think about writing, about poetic composition. And any insight or idea in their criticism grows somehow from the complex, subterranean roots of concern with composition, and with the circumstances of composition. These collected lectures and reviews ["Preoccupations"] by the gifted Irish poet Seamus Heaney often explore those roots in exciting ways, dealing intimately with composition ...

Heaney has plenty of magic in his poetry: that moving on from the first unusual word, the right placing of which is probably in the gift of every poet, to a second one which clinches the insight, and thence to the confirming vision which makes the poem memorable. You can see this in the first poem in [Field Work], entitled 'Oysters.' Clearly, such a mundane subject is going to be made to yield dividends in seriousness, even solemnity. He says his tongue was 'a filling estuary' an...

[Of] the 10 essays in Preoccupations (there are also 11 short reviews), only one stands out: the Berkeley lecture (1976) called "Englands of the Mind," in which Heaney discusses the ways in which sense of place functions as "a confirmation of an identity which is threatened" in the poetic language of Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, and Philip Larkin. The distinctions drawn between Hughes' Anglo-Saxon, Hill's "Anglo-Romanesque," and Larkin's "E...

[The essays in Preoccupations] are freely admitted to be occasional pieces brought about by the life of a freelance writer rather than an academic critic, and none at all the worse for that, though I think that on balance they do throw more light on Heaney's own poetry than others'. Sometimes the writing wears its public responsibility too heavily, the language becoming orotund or tortuous…. Heaney must be as widely read and respected now as any living writer of poetry in English Ȃ...

Seamus Heaney's new volume is Field Work, containing poems written since North in 1976. North was a superb volume; I suppose Field Work is even better, though it is possible that I merely hear more of his voice as I come to know him better…. Heaney's land is Ireland …; but what Ireland? He is a northerner who lives in the south; he writes the English inherited from centuries of oppression, sweetened by the excellence of earlier Anglo-Irish poetry. These conflicts make for energy,...

[Selected Poems 1965–1975] is an impressive little book in that the poems have an obsidian polish and are obviously made to last; that some will, there is no doubt. They are documentary, rural poems shaped out of spare packed words, as if written by a staccato Edward Thomas. The best are pure lyrics like "Anahorish", "The Given Note", and "A New Song"; the least compelling are the ones whose intentions impose on the reader—the well-known bog poems for ...

I've admired Seamus Heaney's work, but have preserved my distance from it: almost no human beings, but grainily humble perceptions in terse lines. There are some further capable poems in this mode in … [North]; yet I confess to being more interested in the group of poems from the book's Part II. There, because he has been pressed to, Heaney writes about being a poet in Ulster in time of The Troubles. "What ever you Say Say Nothing," one of these poems has it; Heaney...

North is the latest collection of verse by Ireland's most significant living poet. The theme is Ireland, but in a new regional and particularly temporal sense. North works less as bleak geographical than as bleaker historical force: from the Vikings of Dublin to the retributive Ulstermen wreaking atrocities in the present…. Ritual brings on and legitimizes the round of punishings. Individual and tribal deaths surface in this secret and retentive landscape, where the poet steps "through ...

[Heaney] seems to do effortlessly what poets in Britain have been trying to do for a long time; that is, to write a profound and important poetry which is at once topical and private, and which is at the same time classically elegant, rich with language, and beautiful to the ear. Heaney is the most loved and envied of poets, both profound and accessible. Undisturbed in his development into the finest Irish poet since Yeats, he seems able to write of the anguish of Northern Ireland without panic or obscurity...