[In the following review of Seamus Heaney, Pratt finds shortcomings in Vendler's qualitative assessment of Heaney's poetry.]

Helen Vendler has built her reputation on taking great poets seriously, and so her readings of Shakespeare and Keats, Yeats and Stevens have been widely admired. She is thought by some to be the contemporary equivalent of a New Critic, a close reader who makes sense of difficult poems, just as Ransom and Tate, Brooks and Warren once did. Seamus Heaney is considered by many to be the nearest equivalent to a great poet alive today, fit to be compared with Yeats and Stevens, or Pound and Eliot, perhaps even with Shakespeare and Keats, whose reputations have endured longer. Therefore, Vendler’s full-length study of Heaney [Seamus Heaney] seems like the marriage of true minds and a literary event in itself.

But literary judgments must stand the test of time, and it is still an open question whether Helen Vendler is truly a New Critic or Seamus Heaney is truly a great poet. This volume brings them together in a significant way, and is published by the Harvard University Press, but it only begs the question of their relative merits, assuming as proven what is still in doubt. To treat all of Heaney’s poetry as uniformly great, on the ground that it is all lyric poetry, and lyric poetry is validated by its form rather than its content, is to practice an extreme of formalism which no New Critic ever practiced, despite the accusations of detractors. To take for granted that North, the volume which Vendler says first attracted her to Heaney, and which was published in 1975 when Heaney was just emerging as a poet of potential greatness, is no better than such a recent volume as The Spirit Level （1996; see WLT 70:4, p. 963）, published shortly after Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, is to overlook qualitative differences in a poet whose unevenness is generally recognized. Yet it is clear that the earlier volume registered with discerning readers, including the Swedish Academy （which awards the Nobel Prize）, while the latter volume could only come “Afterwards,” as Vendler calls her final chapter.

She does grant that some Heaney poems are better than others, not because they are more relevant to the turmoil of Irish politics, but rather because they are more successful experiments in poetic form. Her principal argument is stated in her conclusion: “It should be remembered that the only thing to which the genre of the lyric obliges the poet is to represent his own situation and his responses to it in adequate imaginative language.” Now, Heaney’s preeminence among contemporary poets rests solidly on his ability to find, as he himself puts it in words often quoted by Vendler, “images and symbols adequate to our predicament,” and the bog poems of North are thematically superior to any recent poems he has written, just because they compare the bloodshed inflicted by the Irish on each other with the ritual slaughter practiced by their ancestors in “tribal, intimate revenge.” True, the current cease-fire may last, the bloodshed may lessen in the North of Ireland; but if so, Heaney’s poems will not lose their historical force, less like the pure lyric beauty of Keats than the daunting truthfulness of Yeats, though Heaney’s Irishness, unlike that of Yeats, is ominous, containing more violence than peace.