Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney's Poetics

Nobel Prize winning Irish writer Seamus Heaney has been an ambitious critic as well as poet, publishing five books of literary criticism in the four decades of his career. This book surveys his critical essays, setting forth Heaney's poetics—his concept of what poetry should be and what its uses are—and relating them to his practice as a poet.

The first full-length study of Heaney's poetics, Professing Poetry explores Heaney's unusual concept of influence and the various ways in which Hean...