Seamus Heaney

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.)