[In the following essay, which is based on an interview with Heaney, Bing discusses the poet's early work and the ideas that led to his book, The Redress of Poetry.]

There is a Gaelic superstition still associated with Seamus Heaney's ancestral home in County Derry in Northern Ireland. According to Heaney, a St. Muredach O'Heney once presided over a monastic site affiliated with his family. It's said that if soil is dug from the ground of that site by a Heaney, it carries an aura of magic and beneficence.

Heaney, too, has an aura, if not a star power, shared by few contemporary poets, emanating as much from his leonine features and unpompous sense of civic responsibility as from the immediate accessibility of his lines. Since Robert Lowell dubbed Heaney "the most important Irish poet since Yeats," his poems have entered the core curricula of schools around the world. Listeners jam the rafters at his readings. He has published more than 10 volumes of poetry in 30 years, as well as three collections of essays, one play and a host of translations, chapbooks and other ephemera.

Commanding a great range of voices, idioms and metric conventions, Heaney's poetry nevertheless remains rooted in the soil of his native country-side, in the clash of ancient myth and modern politics, in domestic rituals and elegies for friends, family members and those lost to sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. Despite his oft-invoked pet name, "Famous Seamus," Heaney prefers the solace of his phoneless Wicklow cottage and the toilsome pleasures of teaching to the glare of the limelight. His new volume of critical prose, The Redress of Poetry, is a collection of lectures delivered at Oxford, where he is the Professor of Poetry.

Citing Heaney's "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past," the Nobel committee announced on Oct. 5 that Heaney is to receive this year's prize of $1.1 million. On that day, however, the 56-year-old poet was vacationing with his wife, Marie, in Greece, well beyond the reach of the international media. "We had just passed from Argus into Arcadia," he recalls, when—two days after the announcement—he happened to phone his children in Dublin (there are three, Michael, Christopher and Catherine, all in their 20s). "They were under siege."

When [Publishers Weekly] meets Heaney in Cambridge, Mass., a month later, the public's enchantment with him is unabated. The previous night, 2000 admirers waited in the rain in Harvard Yard to see Heaney read at the centenary celebration of the Harvard art museums.

There's clandestine air to our late-morning rendezvous. Slouched in a chair in a heavy tweed suit in his secluded room in the Harvard Inn, Heaney looks a bit haggard. Under his unruly plume of white hair, his face is tinged with apprehension. As a vacuum cleaner sounds in the hall, he confesses a "weariness" about the "pure publicity" associated with the prize, preferring instead to discuss the poetry itself and the landscape from which it emerged.

The eldest of nine siblings, Heaney was born at Mossbawn, a farm in Derry, 30 miles outside of Belfast. "It was a farming household," he recalls, "with enlightened values [and] a special sense of worth." He attended boarding school from the age of 12, and there he met Seamus Deane, now the Keough Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame and the editor of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing; the two became fast friends, both entering Queen's University in Belfast in the same class. For 10 years, that intimacy shaped and sustained both writers' formative love of the written word ("Deane was the star in our literary firmament," Heaney recalls). In the early 1960s, Heaney taught literature at Queen's University and began placing poems in the New Statesmen, whose editor was Karl Miller ("one of the great editors of our time," notes Heaney), leading to a solicitation from Charles Monty, an editor at Faber & Faber in London. The publisher of Eliot, Auden, MacNeice and Lowell, Faber "was a much more translunar address in 1965," Heaney points out. "It was like getting a letter from God the Father."

Faber brought out Death of a Naturalist in 1966; it won several prizes, including the Somerset Maugham Award. Evincing the influence of Frost, Hopkins and Ted Hughes, these poems evoked his early years at Mossbawn, the tactile fluidity of the farmland, a fascination with buried things and the delights and terrors of childhood. He was to revisit that landscape often in subsequent books, but with Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972) and, especially, North (1975), another Heaney emerged: an allegorist of national politics and mythology. In a series of "bog" poems, Heaney wrote of the mummified, iron-age corpses exhumed from the bogland, emblems of Ireland's first conquerors and martyrs. Other poems dealt with the politics of Ulster, its ethnic humiliations and poetry's role in confronting its terrible history.

In 1972, Heaney moved his family from Belfast to a cottage in Wicklow in the Irish Republic. As North took shape, he stopped teaching for three years. It was then, he recalls, resolutely raising his fist, that the full import of a life devoted to language and poetry grew clear. "I felt that I had vindicated poetry in myself and vindicated the word 'poet' for myself, and when I stood up, it was with the full force of my being," he says. The critic Helen Vendler, among the academy's staunchest Heaney fans, believes North is "one of the greatest of 20th century books of poetry, right up there with Prufrock or Harmonium."

Heaney marked the 1970s with teaching stints at Berkeley and Carysfort College in Dublin, and in 1981, he became a visiting professor at Harvard. Early on, he notes, "I made a choice, for better or worse, to work in the university in order to preserve a kind of nonchalance with regard to publication. I have an old-fashioned ethic of earning my keep. I also have a kind of poetic, protective notion that the poetry should not be a meal ticket."

Heaney also turned out prose—lambent memoirs of Mossbawn and critical essays on poetry—the first collection of which, Preoccupations, appeared in 1980. Asked about the difficulties involved in switching gears from poetry to prose, Heaney shrugs. "It's a different part of your being. That's what the muse means. To some extent [the essays] are my persona as teacher. They're my job. Poetry is completely different. It's a force that feeds off everything else," he says.

Tenured in the halls of academe, however, Heaney was not insulated from the unrest in Northern Ireland, which came to a head in the hunger strikes of the early 1980s. Prompted by the staging in Derry in 1980 of Brian Friel's play, Translations, which showed English surveyors traveling through 18th-century Ireland Anglicizing all the place names, Heaney cofounded the Field Day Theater Group with Friel, Deane, the actor Stephen Rea and others. "That play was a play of wondrous discovery and renewal," recalls Heaney. "It did what theater should do in a society. It was an intravenous shot for people." A pamphleteering campaign followed, as Heaney and Deane began publishing Field Day chapbooks on Irish politics and culture.

While cautiously optimistic about the ongoing peace process, Heaney credits Ulster's poets with a subtler grasp of the dualities of Irish history than the diplomats in Dublin and London. "I think the poetry is ahead of the peace. If you take writers like [Paul] Muldoon and [Ciaran] Carson who live there, their language, their plays and their ploys as writers have to do with outstripping the binary condition that they were offered," he says. "Through changing the language, opening trap doors inside every statement and going into a postmodernist double-take, they have in a sense prefigured the kinds of society that's called for."

If the vitality of Northern Irish literature springs, in part, from political friction, does Heaney worry that the poetry will slacken, as ancient enmities are soothed? "Peace talks don't necessarily mean the disappearance of the causes of the collisions," he says. "It means the onset of civilized ways of handling it, you know, rather than barbaric ways of handling it." He pauses. "I think that every writer in Ireland, North and South, has gone through elegy and tragedy. Stylistically speaking, the challenge is to move it on forward into adept and skeptical playfulness. A post-Beckettian poetics is called for."

It is in the context of Heaney's vexed relationship to art and politics that The Redress of Poetry is best appreciated. When Heaney's tenure at Oxford began in 1989, he says, "I know I was expected to do a kind of postcolonial resentment of English literature, which seems to me predictable, and other people are doing it better than I can."

Heaney chose instead a less fashionable plan: to redeem a few canonical, British and Irish poets from the simplifications and neglect of academic ideologues. Heaney's thesis: that poetry of the highest order shouldn't be fettered to political crusades. Through its "fine excess," its power to outstrip the circumstances it observes and broaden the horizons of its readers, great poetry redresses the profounder spiritual imbalances of its age. This credo is delineated in Redress in chapters on Herbert, Wilde, Yeats, Dylan Thomas and others.

"I think literature is there to open the spaces, not to erect tariff barriers," Heaney explains. "The notion of balance, of one form of life redressing another, of the imagined redressing the endured, that is just a central trope. But it also seems observably true that the sense of proportion, the sense of joy, the sense of irony, depends upon a certain amphibiousness between what we can conceive of and what we have to put up with."

His favorite chapter, on Christopher Marlowe, recovers Tamberlaine and "Hero and Leander" from critics whose sole interest has been to read these texts as complicitous in the bloody legacy of English imperialism. "It's just a corrective to a kind of constricting panic in people that they will give offense," Heaney says. "The language that people are offered in the academy is totally a language of suspicion. Of course, that was a very salubrious language from my generation. But if you teach suspicion to people who have nothing within their minds to suspect, I think it proceeds toward the nihilistic." He pauses, his eyes atwinkle. "The idea that anything that amplifies the spirit can be tied down with a dainty, politically correct label—it's damning, it's deadly. Rapture is its own good."

In the U.S., Oxford published Heaney's first five volumes before he was discovered by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which now handles all of his work. His editor is Jonathan Galassi, who succeeded Michael di Capua and Pat Strachan. Faber serves as his American agent. No appearances are planned to mark publication of The Redress, but come January, Heaney, who teaches at Harvard one semester each year, will again be stationed in his office at Widener Library, and wending his usual way through Harvard Square. "I keep dropping in on the Grolier Poetry Book-shop, run by Louisa Solano," he says. "She valiantly keeps going in what I think is a perilous enough situation for poetry-only [booksellers]."

Meanwhile, he hopes that the Nobel Prize money (which is untaxed in Ireland) will buy him some solitude. With five days a week at his Dublin home and two at the cottage in Wicklow, "I have a fairly constant domestic life," he says. But the creative spirit demands sufficient time for germination and slow revision. "I'm not a kind of spillage system of verse," he laughs. In May, FSG will issue The Spirit Level, Heaney's first volume of poetry in five years. The poet is only middle-aged, after all, and the level of his spirit remains very high, indeed.