The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

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• The Greatest living Irish poet and essayist, and an Oxford reader, as viewed from Cambridge  Jan 27, 2009 (1 of 2 found this helpful)

  The introduction (by editor and contributor, poet Bernard O'Donoghue) to this remarkably comprehensive (for being under three hundred pages, including Index and Guide to Further Reading) study contains mention of Mr. Heaney's inclusion in the 1982 edition of the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry without further comment other than noting this "saw the emergence of Heaney as one of the factors that made a new anthology timely (p. 2)."
  
  This was in 1982 at a moment of hunger strikes in British prisons in Northern Ireland. This overlooks Mr. Heaney's own question at the time of his inclusion in an anthology of British poetry, and for the nonce lets slip the entire political question. Nevertheless, do not this astonishing omission serve to raise red flags nor doubts about the quality of this collection of critical essays; somehow this omission, as in post-modern literature, awakens within the alert reader the question, which shortly is very well reviewed within the introduction itself and the subsequent essays. This is Sherlock Holmes's dog which did not bark in the night, whose lack of bark must alarm us into close attention, an attention which is well repaid.
  
  Mr. Heaney's devotion to his art, his craft has long been challenged by some who seek a more explicit political position, as he came very much through the Troubles in Northern Ireland as a Catholic with a fine British education. On the other hand he would not be accused of milking the pain and suffering of that horrible situation for his personal artistic or commercial benefit. Thus some draw parallel to Mr. WB Yeats, in particular his Easter 1916. See for example: The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats (Cambridge Companions to Literature).
  
  This is the central cross of Mr. Heaney's work, his struggle to write in a time of great political division and death. This is one aspect of his work examined very deeply in these essays, and in this excellent introduction.
  
  Mr. O'Donoghue also contributes a fifteen page essay on "Heaney's Classics and the Bucolic." Heather O'Donoghue writes "Heaney, Beowulf and the Medieval Literature of the North." Neal Corcoran studies Heaney and Yeats. Guinn Batten examines Heaney and Wordsworth and poetics of displacement, telling given Heaney's years in exile from Northern Ireland. Andrew Murphy looks at Heaney and the Irish Poetic tradition, while Dillon Johnston traces Irish influence and confluence in Heaney's poetry. Justin Quinn reveals Heaney's strong interest in the poetry of Eastern Europe. In all fourteen critical essays explain Heaney as his work, including as essayist in David Wheatley's Professing poetry. The fourteen essays (not all mentioned here) end with John Wilson Foster's examination of Heaney after 50, giving all having passed a half century hope as Foster credits Heaney's marvels.
  
  This is indeed a marvelous and worthy companion to Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. Please see the other volumes in this series on Irish poets, as cited above, but above all study well the work in verse and in prose of Mr. Heaney himself, including his collection of lectures entitled The Redress of Poetry and his various recordings of his and other's work, such as Beowulf: A New Translation [Audiobook].