From Publishers Weekly
Perhaps no late 20th-century poet feels the poignantly complex responsibilities of literary vocation as deeply as Seamus Heaney, and with this book Vendler proves that no reader of his work is better attuned to those concerns. Following last year's widely admired The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, her intelligent, lively and reflective exploration of the first three decades of the Nobel laureate's career succeeds in many tasks: it is both an admiring, readable introduction and an anthology of best poems, and it builds an important case for attending to stylistic innovations while still addressing Heaney's relation to Northern Ireland's troubles. Vendler admires his display of a "private mind and heart caught in the changing events of a geographical place and a historical epoch... while enlarging the specifically literary inheritance on which they depend." She enumerates Heaney's innovative, social expansions of forms such as e the sonnet and the elegy ("At the Wellhead" and "Clearances") in thematically and chronologically arranged chapters accompanied by codas that compare poems on similar themes. Defending the poet's artistry at a moment when many critics seem narrowly political, Vendler argues that faithfulness to a more purely poetic agenda is a rewarding virtue: "the only thing to which the genre of the lyric obliges its poet is to represent his own situation and his responses to it in adequate imaginative language." Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Helen Vendler traces Heaney's invention as it evolves from his beginnings in Death of a Naturalist through his most recent volume, The Spirit Level. In sections entitled "Second Thoughts," she 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 volumes, and reconceive them in light of the poet's later attitudes or techniques Vendler surveys all of Heaney's efforts in the classical forms - elegy, genre-scene, sonnet, parable, confessional poem, poem of perception - and brings to light his aesthetic and moral attitudes.

FROM THE CRITICS

Edward Mendelson - The New York Times Book Review

. . . A compact study that traces the full arc of Heaney's career with lurid efficiency. . . .close readings emphasizes the literary ancestry of individual poems.

Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

. . .[A] wonderfully succinct road map to the poet's verse, illuminating the effect that both private and public events have had on the development of his work, while explicating the continual evolution of his style.

Publishers Weekly

Perhaps no late 20th-century poet feels the poignantly complex responsibilities of literary vocation as deeply as Seamus Heaney, and with this book Vendler proves that no reader of his work is better attuned to those concerns. Following last year's widely admired The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, her intelligent, lively and reflective exploration of the first three decades of the Nobel laureate's career succeeds in many tasks: it is both an admiring, readable introduction and an anthology of best poems, and it builds an important case for attending to stylistic innovations while still addressing Heaney's relation to Northern Ireland's troubles. Vendler admires his display of a "private mind and heart caught in the changing events of a geographical place and a historical epoch... while enlarging the specifically literary inheritance on which they depend." She enumerates Heaney's innovative, social expansions of forms such as e the sonnet and the elegy ("At the Wellhead" and "Clearances") in thematically and chronologically arranged chapters accompanied by codas that compare poems on similar themes. Defending the poet's artistry at a moment when many critics seem narrowly political, Vendler argues that faithfulness to a more purely poetic agenda is a rewarding virtue: "the only thing to which the genre of the lyric obliges its poet is to represent his own situation and his responses to it in adequate imaginative language." (Nov.)

John Kerrigan - London Review of Books

Vendler's book has its importance as the work of an influential critic whose friendship with the poet and sympathy with many of his procedures give her special authority...

Michiko Kakutani - New York Times