The difficulty that poets face in negotiating between the local and the universal, between a wish to be true to one's place and cultural heritage and a desire to create an art that will reach beyond the confines of locality, particularly troubles Irish poets, writing, as they do, out of an especially singular culture and writing for an audience largely estranged from that culture. Yeats, of course, provides the most obvious example of an Irish poet able to reach from the particular to the transcendent, but in the decades following Yeats's death, no other Irish poet, with the questionable exception of Patrick Kavanagh, seemed able to fashion a poetic that was both rooted in its native soil and, at the same time, of notable appeal beyond the shores of Ireland.

In the past few years, however, Ireland seems to have produced, in Seamus Heaney, a poet possessing this rather rare capacity…. [By the time that Heaney published Field Work], he was matter-of-factly being described in British and American journals as the most important contemporary voice in Irish poetry and being compared, even, to the great Yeats himself. The question, of course, is why? And, more important, what does Heaney's rather astonishing success among non-Irish readers say about the larger problem of how Irish poets—or poets in general, for that matter—create an art of universal import out of the sticks and stones of their own culture and locality?

Heaney's striking power of rendering experience concretely and sensuously—of creating, as his fellow poet Richard Murphy has said, "the feeling as you read his poems that you are actually doing what they describe"—surely accounts for some of Heaney's success outside his own country. Also, Heaney's immediate welcome among non-Irish readers may owe something to the image of Ireland that his first books tended to present: that of a pastoral world governed by rural values—precisely the kind of Ireland that many English and American readers nostalgically wanted to see. (pp. 139-40)

Heaney certainly, as a poet, has surrendered to his native land and culture: not only has he refused to turn his eyes toward the metropolis, but he also has, in the best of his poems, directed his poetic gaze as far into the depths of his cultural heritage as possible. Indeed, Heaney's poetry as a whole seems informed by the principle of excavation, of digging into his personal past, his language, and, perhaps most important, the cultural past of his country. (p. 141)

Of course, other poets—including other Irish poets: Austin Clarke being the most obvious—have trusted the feel of what they know best, have worked out of a deep commitment to their native culture, and, in terms of their reception outside their own country, have suffered because of it. What makes Heaney different is the archetypal dimension of his poetic involvement with Irish culture. Nowhere is this more evident—and nowhere is Heaney's art more transcendent—than in the poems that Heaney has written about the peat bogs of Ireland and Jutland and the treasures and horrors that they have preserved. (p. 142)

Starting with "Bogland" in Door Into the Dark, continuing with "The Tollund Man" in Wintering Out, and culminating in a series of poems about figures preserved by the bog in North, his fourth volume, Heaney has developed the image of the bog into a powerful symbol of the continuity of human experience that at once enables him to write about the particularities of his own parish, past and present, and to transcend, at the same time, those particularities.

Heaney has compared the bog in Irish culture to the frontier in American culture, and has described his use of the bog "as an answering Irish myth," but it serves as more than that. As the figures of bog queens, sacrificial victims, and adulteresses are raised from the bog by Heaney's poetry, they take on archetypal significance, calling to mind not just the specific values of an ancient northern culture, but also qualities of human experience that are timeless and not the exclusive property of one culture. Poems like "Bog Queen," "The Grauballe Man," "Punishment," "Strange Fruit," and "Kinship"—all in North—are local in so far as they insist on the connection between the violence and terror of the Viking age and the violence and terror of contemporary Belfast and Derry. They have universality insofar as they insist, as they do, that the evidence found in these bogs of human cruelty—and, concurrently, of the human need for ritual and community—has something to say about human nature as it has always existed. In this sense, the bog functions in Heaney's poems much as the Homeric parallel functions in Joyce's Ulysses and much as the fertility myths and Arthurian legends function in Eliot's The Waste Land. (p. 143)

The kind of archetypal power found in Heaney's bog poems is not, of course, a required ingredient for poetry that seeks to transcend the confines of locality. One need only to turn to … [Field Work]—and especially to poems like "The Guttural Muse," "The Otter," "The Skunk," "Harvest Bow," and the Glanmore sonnet sequence—to verify this. For an Irish poet writing in the 20th century, and trying to remain true to his roots in a culture largely unfamiliar to most of his readers, the poetic that Heaney has fashioned out of the notion of excavation and, more specifically, out of the image of the bog, provides a means both of expressing a faith in "the social and artistic validity of his parish," and, at the same time, of creating an art that bears significantly on the "fundamentals" of human experience. (pp. 145-46)