SOURCE: An introduction to Seamus Heaney: Poet of Contrary Progressions, Syracuse University Press, 1992, pp. 1-8.

[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.]

Few twentieth-century poets writing in English have been able to secure a wide audience among general readers and critics alike. After W. B. Yeats, only Robert Frost achieved such bipartisan acclaim, although for many years scholars denigrated Frost beside the intellectually more sophisticated modernists. In a culture where films, television shows, and compact discs have usurped the monopoly on communication that books once enjoyed, a popular poet is rare. Maintaining an "international reputation," as a writer in The Observer recently commented, "is a tricky business…. It takes a special gift to win hearts on both sides...