[In the following review of The Redress of Poetry, Bayley maintains that though Heaney's criticism is sound and fair, it offers no new startling insights.]

Seamus Heaney's slim book of offerings as Oxford Professor of Poetry gives the impression of being adjusted with courtly discretion to an audience who expect the familiar rather than the new. His most interesting essays are an introduction on the The Redress of Poetry, and its follow-up on Hero and Leander in an Irish context. Later pieces on MacDiarmid and Dylan Thomas, Brian Merriman and John Clare, are sound but conventional, as if Heaney as a poet can only be saying the proper things about other poets, as he does in passing about contemporaries like Holub, Brodsky and the Europeans. The poet as diplomat is an honourable and unusual role (and Heaney's success in it has been suitably and deservedly recognized, along with his achievement in poetry, by the Nobel Committee); but the critic exercising the same kind of function runs the risk of giving pleasure without surprise or illumination.

And yet the essays are rich in good things, one of the best being Heaney's discussion of Marlowe's erotic verse, in which he points out that "the reader is enticed towards a tolerant attitude by having his or her sexual preferences toyed with, and having the opposite preference discreetly insinuated at the same time". Heaney's own enticements are equally admirable, as if political correctness, in sexual as in other matters, came as naturally to him as breathing. It seems even to come to him naturally on the matter of death. Though never censorious, he cannot stomach Larkin's great "Aubade", in which the hopelessness of the situation is redeemed only by the grim Anglo-drabness of work that has to be done and the hope of receiving letters—"postmen like doctors go from house to house". Heaney prefers the rhetorical consolations of Yeats ("O Rocky Voice / Shall we in that great night rejoice?") and, more surprisingly, of Samuel Beckett, both of whom he considers, in contrast to Larkin, to be "on the side of life".

Heaney's infallible courtliness goes none the less with an uninsistent but ultimate criterion, which can seem a bit like a poetic version of political correctness. What was lost in the later Dylan Thomas was a quality that might be called "tonal rectitude", "taking tone in the radically vindicating sense attributed to it by Eavan Boland". The origins of such rectitude "must always be in a suffered world rather than a conscious craft". An ambiguous claim, which might mean much or nothing, and yet Heaney endorses Boland's judgment in a prose as persuasive as his poetry. The power of a "poet's undermusic" should come from "a kind of veteran knowledge which has gathered to a phonetic and rhythmic head, and forced an utterance":

It is, for example, the undermusic of just such knowledge that makes Emily Dickinson devastating as well as endearing, and makes the best of John Ashbery's poetry the common unrarefied expression of a disappointment that is beyond self-pity.

That is eloquently said, although the attribution of "rectitude", of any sort, to these or any other poets may seem superfluous and even dubious. Larkin's sardonic shade is yet once again in the background. Does he, one wonders, possess "tonal rectitude"—TR as it might be called, an excuse for PCness, which he certainly did not possess? Like all other such attempts at a general criterion—Matthew Arnold's "touchstones" for instance—this one dissolves into mere concept when confronted with the realities of poetry.

And yet apart from things which Larkin himself would not have bothered about (he always refused to give any kind of lecture on poetry), both as poets and human beings Heaney and Larkin have much in common. Heaney's rectitude (also a more diplomatic term than correctness) is never nationalistic; as he movingly tells us in his last brief lecture, "Frontiers of Writing", which includes a poem in which he takes leave of his professorial duties, he and Larkin, the English poet who loved Ulster, and once worked over there, "are part / Of some new common-wealth of art" and can salute each other "with independent heart". In the same way, he says, Louis MacNeice was "an Irish protestant writer with Anglocentric tendencies, who managed to be faithful to his Ulster inheritance, his Irish affections, and his English predilections". Still more important is the homeliness and love of domestic detail which Heaney and Larkin share, as poets and as men, including a relish for those "small blameless pleasures" praised by Larkin as typical of the art of Barbara Pym. And it is a fine as well as a humane critic who has noticed, as Heaney has, the homely touches that humanize those elegantly Ovidian and androgynous antics in Marlowe's Hero and Leander:

      If not for love, yet, love, for pity sake
      Me in thy bed and maiden bosom take;
      At least vouchsafe those arms some little room,
      Who hoping to embrace thee, cheerly swum …
      Herewith affrighted Hero shrunk away,
      And in her lukewarm place Leander lay.

A flagrant case of sexual harassment, but never mind that—Heaney shows just what it is in the scene that is so touching. "The lukewarm place that Leander slips into under the bedclothes was probably never warmed again, in exactly the right way, until Molly Bloom jingled the bedstrings more than three hundred years later."