SOURCE: An interview with Seamus Heaney, in Salmagundi, No. 80, Fall, 1988, pp. 4-21.

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.

[BRANDES]: With your recent birthday (your 49th), you are entering what MacNeice called "the middle stretch." Do you feel you are at a pivotal point in your work? [HEANEY]: Ever since I published a book, I have felt at a pivotal point. Publication is rather like pushing the boat out; then the boat/book turns into a melting ice floe and you have to conjure a second boat which again turns into a melting floe under your feet. All the stepping stones that you conjure disappear under the water behind you. So the condition of being on a moving stair that gets you only as far as you are...