SOURCE: "Orpheus in Ireland: On Brian Merriman's The Midnight Court" in The Southern Review, Louisana State University, Vol. 31, No. 3, July, 1995, pp. 786-806.

In the following essay (originally a lecture delivered at Oxford University), Heaney, the best known Irish poet of the late twentieth century, traces the political contexts of earlier interpretations of "The Midnight Court" and argues that the poem deserves greater recognition as a classic of world literature.

Joseph Brodsky once suggested that the highest goal human beings can set themselves is the creation of civilisation. What Brodsky had in mind was much the same thing, I assume, as W. B. Yeats had in mind when he spoke about the "profane perfection of mankind," a perfection that for Yeats depended on something he called, in another context, "the spiritual intellect's great work." In fact, in their own extravagant and undaunted ways, what both poets were really talking...