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"The most astute and eloquent critic of poetry at work today."
--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

A renowned American critic charts the creative evolution of the greatest Irish poet since Yeats.

If other books on Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney have dwelled on the biographical, geographical, and political aspects of his writing, Helen Vendler looks squarely and deeply at his poetic art. Tracing the eminent poet's development from his beginnings in Death of a Naturalist (1966) through The Spirit Level (1996), Seamus Heaney is an inspired and nuanced portrait of an Irish chronicler of public as well as private life, whose work has given voice to his troubled times.

With characteristic discernment and eloquence, Vendler considers an often neglected but crucial part of Heaney's evolving talent: self-revision. Here we see how later poems return to the themes or genres of the earlier works and reconceive them in light of the poet's later attitudes or techniques. Vendler surveys all of Heaney's efforts in the classical forms--genre scene, elegy, sonnet, parable, confessional poem, poem of perception--and brings to light his aesthetic and moral attitudes.

Seamus Heaney's development as a poet is inextricably connected to the violent struggle that racked Northern Ireland during his lifetime. Vendler shows how, in each volume, Heaney strived to find a precise language for the turbulence he was living through--"symbols adequate for our predicament," as he once said. The worldwide response to those discovered symbols suggests that their relevance extends far beyond their original context.