[In the following excerpt, Shetley enthuses about Heaney's “sensitive” perspective on contemporary poetics in The Redress of Poetry.]

In his criticism, T. S. Eliot once asserted, a poet “is always trying to defend the kind of poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind that he wants to write.” Far from deploring this lack of disinterestedness, Eliot felt that the critical writings of poets “owe a great deal of their interest” to this implicit self-reference, and no doubt many readers are led to Seamus Heaney's prose out of a desire to learn more about the writer of the poems. A good deal about Heaney's poetics is to be learned, if somewhat obliquely, in The Redress of Poetry; readers will also find that the qualities of sympathy, generosity, and curiosity that mark his poetry are equally on display in Heaney's prose. Readers who come to Heaney's essays to learn more about their writer will find themselves led outward by his sensitive appreciations to new worlds of poetic pleasure.

The gates to pleasure, though, in our moment seem guarded by some severe angels indeed, and Heaney clearly feels he must take cognizance of them at the outset. The volume's first essay, which shares its title, sees poetry pressured between the immediacy of political demands, and the corrosive skepticism that characterizes the postmodern intellect. Against these pressures Heaney asserts an ideal of poetry not as “an agent for proclaiming and correcting injustices” but as “a working model of inclusive consciousness,” “a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances.” Heaney defines the mode of “redress” he argues for as one that would “set [poetry] up as its own category, an eminence established and a pressure exercised by distinctly linguistic means.” This perspective, of course, is conditioned by Heaney's situation as an Irish Catholic poet who nevertheless refuses to put his poetry into the service of a sectarian program.

But if Heaney has declined to become a spokesman for the nationalist cause, he has just as firmly resisted being defined as a British poet, as an untroubled member of an imperium centered on England. Heaney's own experiences have made him particularly sensitive to the ways that “in emergent cultures the struggle of an individual consciousness towards affirmation and distinctness may be analogous … with a collective straining towards self-definition.” Relations between the imperial center and the margins are a hidden preoccupation running through much of the volume; most of the poets Heaney treats resisted, or operated at the margins of, “the normative authority of the dominant language or literary tradition.” Hugh MacDiarmid is Heaney's most self-conscious objector to the authority of the “normative,” but even Elizabeth Bishop, whose imaginative world revolved around the twin poles of Nova Scotia and Brazil, he defines in part through her distance from “the literary life of the States.” Heaney is careful, though, not to turn his celebrations of “outsiders” into an argument for parochialism; instead, the local and marginal figure for Heaney as emblems of that world of imaginative freedom where all traditions stand equal. The essay on John Clare offers a moving defense of that poet's linguistic localism as a means to “dream of a world where no language will be relegated,” and the chapter on Brian Merriman's The Midnight Court places this “poem from beyond the Pale” not merely within a tradition of Gaelic dream-visions but within the whole trajectory of the Orpheus myth, and within a context of sexual politics that makes it seem alive and urgent today. The reader who, upon finishing Heaney's essay, doesn't rush to the library to find the whole of this marvelous poem, is a good deal less suggestible than I.