Volume 43, Number 12 · July 11, 1996
The Orpheus of Ulster
By James Fenton
RECENT BOOKS BY SEAMUS HEANEY DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
The Spirit Level
by Seamus Heaney
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 82 pp., $18.00
The Redress of Poetry
by Seamus Heaney
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 212 pp., $22.00
Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture
by Seamus Heaney
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 54 pp., $12.00
In 1982, when Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion published their Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, Seamus Heaney exploded. He had had enough. He was not British, and he was fed up with being called British, or anything other than Irish. But since his work had first appeared with Faber in 1966, it had regularly been called British, and it had appeared in such anthologies as Edward Lucie-Smith's British Poetry Since 1945 (1970), Jeremy Robson's The Young British Poets (1971), Michael Schmidt's Eleven British Poets (1980), and even, in 1968, Karl Miller's Writing in England Today: The Last Fifteen Years. It was time to set the record straight.
Review, 5124 words
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