SOURCE: Deane, Seamus. “Powers of Earth and Visions of Air.” In Seamus Heaney: The Shaping Spirit, edited by Catharine Malloy and Phyllis Carey, pp. 27-33. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Deane connects the political aspects of Heaney's poetry with definitions of Ireland as both cultural and geographic entities.

Since his first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), Seamus Heaney has been much concerned with deaths of various kinds. His life as a writer has almost exactly coincided with the most recent period of crisis in Northern Ireland, and the degeneration of that rancid statelet over the past twenty years has provided enough violent killings to deepen a preoccupation that was already there in the early work. In Heaney's poetry, as in the political world that subsists with it, there is a need to possess or to repossess a territory that is always there in its...