SOURCE: Dodsworth, Martin. “Edward Thomas, Seamus Heaney and Modernity: A Reply to Antony Easthope.” English 49, no. 194 (summer 2000): 143-54.

In the following essay, the author disagrees with Antony Easthope's dismissal of Thomas's poem “Adelstrop” as metrically regular and “comfortable” in an unchallenging way. The author discusses the structural complexities of “Adelstrop” structural complexities in comparison with Seamus Heaney's “The Graubelle Man,” and argues for a more nuanced understanding of modernist poetry.

In his article ‘How Good is Seamus Heaney?’ (English 46.184, Spring 1997, 21-36) Antony Easthope elaborates a simple and schematic thesis. It runs as follows: in English poetry the major tradition embodies ‘a version of empiricism’ in its poetic practice, an empiricism radically challenged by Modernism in the persons of Pound and Eliot whose true heirs are poets like J. H. Prynne and Tom Raworth. Heaney's poetry fails because, unlike theirs, it fails to face the challenge of Modernism. Instead...