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Four narratives intertwine to provide a context for the materials collected here. The first tells of the amazingly rapid growth of a living writer's reputation over the last thirty years and is enlivened with Heaney's critical commentary on his own work and on poetry in general as he makes his bid to influence the climate of taste in which his poems will be read. The second involves the emergence within that same time-span of a challenging range of critical methodologies to compete with the Anglo-American "New Criticism" which had governed the young Heaney's notions of poetic technique and schooled him as a critic in the early 1960s. In the third narrative, Britain and Ireland engage with their postcolonial legacy as the intercommunal conflicts endemic to the latter island break out, flourish and subside across the disputed territory where Heaney and other "Northern"¹ poets have their roots. The fourth and core narrative, constantly modifying and modified by the other three, displays the development of Heaney's verse, from the rich sensuousness of Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969) and the early poems of Wintering Out (1972), through the myth-making that book shares with North (1975), towards a sinuous but plainer style in Field Work (1979) and Station Island (1984), often becoming parabolic in The Haw Lantern (1987) and Seeing Things (1991). (Visible in such poems as "Fosterling" in the latter volume is an authorial capacity to reconstruct his own early literary identity which emerges fully in The Spirit Level 1996.)

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-10682-0_1

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