Biography Essay

From the beginning critical as well as popular acclaim has greeted each volume of Seamus Heaney's poetry. Who would have predicted in 1966, when his first full-length book appeared, the impact such poetry would have? It is, after all, a poetry manifestly regional and largely rural in subject matter and traditional in structure—a poetry that appears to be a deliberate step back into a premodernist world of William Wordsworth and John Clare and to represent a rejection of most contemporary poetic fashions.

Indeed, one generally favorable review of Door into the Dark (1969), Heaney's second volume, points with dry irony to the notion of retrogression: "Turbines and pylons for the 1930s: bulls for the 1960s. It's an odd progression." Perhaps, though, it is this very sense of return to a natural world and traditional forms that explains the popular response to Heaney's work (sales for each...