SOURCE: Pratt, William. “The Great Irish Elk: Seamus Heaney's Personal Helicon.” World Literature Today 70, no. 2 (spring 1996): 261-66.

In the following essay, Pratt provides an overview of Heaney's life and career through his 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.

When Yeats received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923, he was fifty-eight and at the height of his poetic powers, which happily continued undiminished for another sixteen years. Yeats wrote some of his best poems in the last years of his life, the decade and a half that followed the Nobel Prize, and in his Autobiographies he even went so far as to say that “The Bounty of Sweden” made him feel that though he was old his Muse was young. Seamus Heaney has long been recognized as a worthy successor to Yeats; we can hope that, in receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1995, he will share not only Yeats's honor...