SOURCE: “The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh,” in Massachusetts Review, Vol. 28, No. 3, Autumn, 1987, pp. 371–80.

In the essay below, poet Heaney relates his personal experience with Kavanagh's poetry and its importance to his life through several decades.

In 1939, the year that Patrick Kavanagh arrived in Dublin, an aunt of mine planted a chestnut in a jamjar. When it began to sprout she broke the jar and made a hole and transplanted the thing under a hedge in front of the house. Over the years, the seedling shot up into a young tree that rose taller and taller above the boxwood hedge. And over the years I came to identify my own life with the life of the chestnut tree.

This was because everybody remembered and constantly repeated the fact that it had been planted the year I was born; also because I was something of a favourite with...