SOURCE: Shetley, Vernon. “The State of Poetry.” Partisan Review 64, no. 4 (fall 1997): 674-76.

In the following excerpt, Shetley enthuses about Heaney's “sensitive” perspective on contemporary poetics in The Redress of Poetry.

In his criticism, T. S. Eliot once asserted, a poet “is always trying to defend the kind of poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind that he wants to write.” Far from deploring this lack of disinterestedness, Eliot felt that the critical writings of poets “owe a great deal of their interest” to this implicit self-reference, and no doubt many readers are led to Seamus Heaney's prose out of a desire to learn more about the writer of the poems. A good deal about Heaney's poetics is to be learned, if somewhat obliquely, in The Redress of Poetry; readers will also find that the qualities of sympathy, generosity, and curiosity that mark his poetry are equally...