SOURCE: "Beginnings," in Seamus Heaney, Bucknell University Press, 1975, pp. 19-35.

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

"A poet begins involved with craft, with aspirations that are chiefly concerned with making," Seamus Heaney has said in a statement about his aims which he wrote two or three years ago to accompany a selection of his poems (Corgi Poets in Focus 2). The poet "needs a way of saying and there is a first language he can learn from the voices of other poets, dead and alive." He could have cited "Turkeys Observed" as an illustration of part of his own apprenticeship; this poem, which appeared in the Belfast Telegraph in 1962 (and later in Death of a Naturalist), was his first published one aside from several published before then over the pseudonym Incertus in Gorgon and Q...