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“... to the Irish experience. In saying ‘civil’, I do not mean or imply ‘genteel’. Seamus Heaney, writing of early Irish nature poetry, mentions how it can communicate ‘Little jabs of delight in the elemental’ and distinguishes this from the effect of the bulk (not all) of English verse. ‘It almost seems,’ he says, ‘that since ...”

“... and hear what I’ve actually written, to acknowledge what I am.’ In ‘The Redress of Poetry’ Seamus Heaney has recognised, among writers situated on the margins of English culture, a tendency ‘to refuse the exclusive civilities of established canonical English literature’. They want to ‘give voice and retaliatory presence to suppressed ...”

“... has been called ‘one of the finest poets writing in English, one of a superleague that includes Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky’. This is astonishingly vulgar, and I suppress the author’s name to spare his blushes. But if we reject the notion that poets can be ranked internationally like sprinters or discus-throwers, still we must ...”

“... cleverest.’ He never became resentable to readers, either at home or abroad. Poets liked him. Seamus Heaney of course liked him, but so did others as dissimilar as Joseph Brodsky, Andrew Motion and (one of his first translators) Robert Bly. Poets were drawn to translate him too: fellow Northerners like Robin Fulton (for a long time now a resident of ...”

“... Sixties and beyond. It was a balancing act with a superficial resemblance to the one practised by Seamus Heaney a decade later in Northern Ireland, in which the poet had to pay lip-service to the claims of the ‘cause’, while the poetry insisted on occupying a free state of the imagination. If anything, Germany – and certainly German literature ...”

“... time came, he saw the point of Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn, for all the latter’s youthful scorn. Seamus Heaney he describes as ‘a man of immense good will’ who ‘wrote poems which are models of what we might call the late Georgian Yeatsian Irish peasant’. Here is the sentence of a poet who felt himself to be a modernist and who on another ...”

“... him in the way the stony ground of Ireland appeals, in every sense and whatever its troubles, to Seamus Heaney. Some writers – Joyce, Milosz, Stevenson – have to stand well back from the native canvas in order to see the composition, but others dwell inside the painting, loving the paint, the smell of oils and the fine smear of themselves. This new ...”

“... himself from Contemporary Irish Poetry, his 1986 Faber anthology, but he included a poem by Seamus Heaney that was dedicated to him. We don’t of course know why the poem was dedicated to him, or indeed whether it is in any sense about him. It is a suggestive poem about what the living can get from the dead: Widgeon For Paul Muldoon It had been ...”

“... Norwich. At a staid University Teachers of English get-together George Steiner, Frank Kermode and Seamus Heaney do their party pieces and a novelist – the author of Doctor Criminale, we must suppose – reads from his upcoming work, ‘whose ending he seems not to know’. The publisher’s blurb laconically informs us that Bradbury lives in Norwich ...”

“... I am on the road to the airport, and getting ready to be an Irish writer abroad, I might think of Seamus Heaney, who lived near the strand, and once joked that his family only saw him walk it when he had a film crew in tow. This cluster stumbles backwards in my mind: the boom microphone, the shouldered camera, the production assistant and her ...”

“... him with the anti-reckless word ‘classical’ and with ‘the gift of epic objectivity’, and Seamus Heaney praises his ‘poised and appeased self-knowledge’. I am timid about disagreeing with such powerful recommenders, but I disagree almost entirely. An ‘epic objectivity’ may be present in what is far and away Murphy’s best poem, the long ...”

“... size and comparison. Norman MacCaig, who knew him well, thought MacDiarmid was an ‘egomaniac’; Seamus Heaney has described him as ‘very egocentric’. Neither of them, sensibly, thinks that an imperfect or monstrous life makes much difference to the poetry. But if poetry remains its own best defence, then what is to be gained by reminding us of the ...”

“... and literary criticism through and after the 20th century. When he discusses Yeats, Joyce or Heaney, Donoghue doesn’t just understand their language but feels it too, and the whole book explains through close analysis of poems by Pound, Stevens and Eliot why image and metaphor have come to occupy such a central position in modernist poetry and ...”

“... over the place and each other; they disturb the grave that Watkins had marked out for his verse. Seamus Heaney says of Thomas that ‘as long as he kept too rigidly to those bodily, earthly Egyptian imperatives, it was not possible for Thomas to admit into his poetry that which Rilke called the angels’ and he takes a strong Platonic line against ...”

“... as a language we possess ‘more deeply and sonorously than most of the English themselves’, as Seamus Heaney said of Derek Walcott. One language has gone, and that means that the one we use now could fade too, slip and fail, as Mrs Rooney in Beckett’s All That Fall points out to Mr Rooney when he says ‘sometimes one would think you were struggling ...”