[In the following excerpt, Burris places Heaney's poetry within the context of pastoral tradition.]

Abducted by Hades and spirited away to the underworld, Persephone ate several seeds from a pomegranate, the fruit traditionally associated with marriage and fertility cults. The price of her impudence was her freedom. Ingestion of the fruit sealed the marital alliance, and Demeter, Persephone's mother and one of the oldest, most powerful goddesses of the Greek pantheon, lost her daughter to an infernal son-in-law. With Zeus as her advocate, however, Demeter struck a deal with Hades, and Persephone was allowed to live with her mother for the better part of each year. During this time, the crops flourished. But when Persephone returned to the underworld to spend the remaining months with her husband, the earth became cold and barren. For the Greeks, the seasonal cycle—the pastoral calendar—sprang from a pomegranate seed.

The etymological history of the word "pomegranate" claims an essentially pastoral lineage, one that exemplifies what Puttenham, in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), described as the genre's tendency to employ "rude speeches to insinuate and glance at greater matters." Its Latin root "granatus" means, simply, "having many seeds," and the Romans used the substantive "granatum" to denote the same fruit, centuries before them, that the Babylonians had thrown on the floor of the bridal chamber—the fat, ripe pomegranates would burst open, scattering their seeds and, it was hoped, their fertility, on the newly married couple. Later, the French realized that the pomegranate exploded in much the same fashion as one of their own implements of war, and their coinage eventually yielded our "grenade," or "hand grenade," as it is most commonly known. This duplicity of the word "grenade," with its obvious allegiance to the martial tradition but with its informing vision of marital fertility, makes it one of the luminous words in the title poem of Heaney's first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966):

Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like snails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

Puttenham would not have acknowledged "Death of a Naturalist" as a work of pastoral art, even though its language is muscularly rude. The glittering pastures that he envisaged lay far from the open countryside, and these "self-same hills," when depicted in "Lycidas" and early Renaissance poetry, arrive with cartographic accuracy from Virgil's "Eclogue 4," an eclogue radiant with the promise of a restored Golden Age. Such promises, however, make exacting demands on the poet. To dream of a Golden Age, to create the illusion of perfection, pastoral writers sparingly deployed the particularizing detail that might suddenly have transported their readers from an Arcadian vale to an English valley. A decision to write pastoral poetry automatically entailed formal requirements, and these forms dictated the predictable conformations of pastoral landscapes. Suited in such constrictive armor, the genre would seem impervious to the obsessive particularity of Heaney's poem. But even the earliest English pastorals are partly shorn of their Grecian garb, incorporating specific details of the English country side while preserving themes and ideas inherited from the classical models. Digression often breeds irrelevancy, but the various registers of the pastoral voice are nowadays as elusive as they once were alluring; Heaney's version of pastoral develops several strategies native to the tradition, and an analysis of these strategies will provide the historical background necessary to assess the exact nature of Heaney's accomplishment.

With its opening invitation, Robert Herrick's "The Wake" (1648) recalls an invitation found in Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" (1599), written a half-century earlier. "Come live with me, and be my love," began Marlowe's shepherd, in the land with "Vallies, groves, hills and fields" that have become for many readers the emblematic topography of classical pastoral. But Herrick's speaker, perhaps equally idealistic in his travel plans, exhibits a more English, more localized sense of place than that of his predecessor:

Come, Anthea, let us two
Go to Feast, as others do.
Tarts and Custards, Creams and Cakes,
Are the Junketts still at Wakes:
Unto which the Tribes resort,
Where the business is the sport.
Morris-dancers thou shalt see,
Marian, too, in Pagentrie:

And a Mimick to devise
Many grinning properties.
Players there will be, and those
Base in action as in clothes;
Yet with strutting they will please
The incurious Villages.
Near the dying of the day
There will be a Cudgell-play
Where a Coxcomb will be broke,
Ere a good word can be spoke:
But the anger ends all here,
Drenched in Ale or drowned in Beere.
Happy Rusticks, best content
With the cheapest Merriment;
And possesse no other feare
Than to want the Wake next Yeare.

The vision here of rural simplicity and abundance is common to pastoral writing from its beginnings in Theocritus and Virgil. If Herrick's seems a somewhat decadent, condescending version—his rustics, after all, are "drowned in Beere"—his affable setting, a Bruegel scene in all its particularity, begins to color the pastoral horizon. In 1629, Herrick became a country clergyman in Devonshire; since 1623, he had been a member of Jonson's literary coterie in London, and the splenetic rural clergyman never forgot the splendid royal courtier. Although employing the generalized, pastoral themes of simplicity and abundance, the poem relies on its subversive particularity—as the tarts and custards yield to ale, beer, and drunkenness—to chart the peot's disgruntlement.

With one eye on the shepherd and the other, for example, on Milton's "Corrupted clergy," pastoral poets have always been walleyed, and this skewed vision accounts for the pastoral's notoriety as a genre susceptible to social and political commentary. In Heaney's case, the concreteness and vivid detail of his writing subsume the several pastoral conventions that still survive to structure his poems. At first glance, his work has little in common with what is habitually labeled pastoral. If "Death of a Naturalist," a poem whose "fields were rank with cowdung," appears perfectly opposed to the "beds of roses" in Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," such opposing appearances are resolved by Puttenham's suggestion that pastorals employ their rude diction to "insinuate and glance at greater matters." Where grenades are found in Heaney's work, so too are pomegranates, and this subliminal attempt to reconcile the violent particularity of his landscape with some of the generalizing conventions of pastoral poetry aligns him with an important aspect of the genre's tradition.

Displaying these powers of insinuation that Puttenham described, much of Heaney's work remains faithful to its pastoral origins. To speak of contemporary poetry as pastoral in nature is not to speak of its adherence to a set of formal conventions. Swinburne's elegy, "Ave Atque Vale," which appeared in 1868, claims the honor of being the last unquestionably great English elegy to boast of its classical parentage, and by then even that magnificent lamentation seems a step removed from late Victorian verse—the poem excels as much in its nostalgic rarity as in its stunning poetic accomplishments. Heaney would have bewildered Puttenham, as Swinburne would have dismayed him, but he would also have been brought up short by the antipastoral, by Stephen Duck's "The Thresher's Labour" (1736). Although originally from the Wiltshire countryside, he was eventually adopted as a kind of court poet in London, and as a consequence, his verse lost much of its idiosyncratic stamp. Yet Duck's best work insists on the vigorously revisionary impulse that characterizes antipastoral writing and survives to build the foundation for the dissenting voice, the voice of the Northern Irish Catholic heard in Heaney's verse. Here is Duck, in "The Thresher's Labour," protesting and disabusing:

The Shepherd well may tune his Voice to sing
Inspir'd with all the Beauties of the Spring.
No fountains murmur here, no Lambkins play,
No Linnets warble, and no Fields look gay;
'Tis all a gloomy, melancholy Scene,
Fit only to provoke the Muse's Spleen.

But even older, less drastic examples show a similar sensibility. Would Puttenham have recognized the pastures surrounding Penshurst in Jonson's poem of 1616, a time much closer to his own? Though he would have found satyrs lurking and muses lounging and dryads gamboling about the grounds, Puttenham would also have heard a wistful appraisal of feudal harmony at the Penshurst manor, a house whose walls were "rear'd with no man's ruine, no man's grone…." The manor house, once a symbol of power and patronage, of a cooperative understanding between lord and laborer, already appears in the poem bathed in the flattering glow of a distant Golden Age. Because the social order of rural seventeenth-century England relied upon the stabilizing influence and regional authority of the major families, James I had tried to force the English nobility to forsake the indulgent pleasures of London and assume their rightful post as lord and lady of the manor house. Jonson's poem, celebrating Penshurst, the ancestral home of Sidney, presents an enticing vision of Protestant moderation ("Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show") and English ascendancy ("Sidney's copse").

But even in the early seventeenth century, some poets were hearing the laborer's groan; some were beginning to claim the hardships of the laborer's life as a subject for poetry and were doing so by deploying their disgruntlements as correctives to pastoral commonplaces. A new realism is afoot and the first two couplets of Francis Quarles's "On the Plough-Man" (1635) succinctly contrasts the traditional pastoral image with the author's qualifying observation, at once generic and political in its objection:

I heare the whistling Plough-man, all day long,
Sweetning his labour with a chearefull song:
His Bed's a Pad of Straw; His dyet course;
In both, he fares not better then his Horse….

As startled as Puttenham would have been to find these poems included in a discussion of pastoral poetry, he would have sympathized in equal measure with the involved arguments that landed them there. Quarles's objection represents an early example of the pastoral's propensity for social and political criticism. Part of Heaney's success in dramatizing the various quandaries faced by the Catholic population of rural Northern Ireland derives from the pastoral's ability to undermine a literary convention with a particularized description. The toppled assumption—whether political or literary—is a less visible result of pastoral writing than of polemical speech making, but the tradition has provided verbal strategies that allow Heaney to depict his own culture in ways that reveal its integrity while gently dispersing the English culture that would disfranchise him. The neat distinctions implied by the terms "pastoral" and "antipastoral" seem to clarify the essential development of a long tradition in English writing: by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the laborer's groan was at least as loud as the shepherd's song, and the literature that had once celebrated the harmonies of the countryside now exposed the poverty and hardships suffered by its people.

Yet the story is not so simple. When read closely, the early commentaries reveal a clear awareness of the difference between a plowed field engaged in hawthorne and an emerald pasture rimmed in laurel. Real shepherds, the commentators have always claimed, never enjoyed the carefree ease of the rural life depicted by the classical pastoral. One of the first attempts to develop a systematic exposition of the rudiments and origins of English verse, Puttenham's treatise devotes little space to the pastoral mode or "kind." But his reply to the widely popular notion that the pastoral, because it dealt with an ancient, even prehistoric way of life, represented the oldest form of writing in existence shows that he understood the essential problems confronting all critics who attempt to define the literature:

Some be of the opinion … that the pastoral Poesie … should be the first of any other … because, they say, the shepheards and haywards assemblies and meetings when they kept their cattell and heards in the common fields and forests was the first familiar conversation, and their babble and talk under bushes and shadie trees, the first disputation and contentious reasoning…. And all this may be true, for before there was a shepheard keeper of his owne, or of some other bodies flocke, there was none owner in the world, quick cattell being the first property of any forreine possession…. But for all this, I do deny that the Eclogue should be the first and most ancient forme of artificiall Poesie, being perswaded that the Poet devised the Eclogue long after drammatick poems … to insinuate and glance at greater matters….

(book 1, chapter 18)

Puttenham gives full credence to the methodology of an argument that would define a literary genre by locating its origin in the world of daily affairs, of "quick cattell"; when he finally discourages the application of that argument to the "Eclogue," he does so by implying that a realistic representation of the country life was never the intention of pastoral writing. But the charge had been leveled, and an essential aspect of the pastoral had been recognized: in its attempt to describe theperfected rural society, a society removed from the daily affairs of the city and capable of rendering implicit judgments on those affairs, the best pastoral writing developed rhetorical strategies both to describe the world as it is and to envisage the world as it had been in a past Golden Age. Heaney's earliest verse often depicts the fondest recollections of a childhood passed in the country with an aggressive, even militaristic diction, emphasizing at once the integrity of his culture and the violence that has become a part of its daily ritual. Puttenham is fully aware of the pastoral's natural proclivity for commenting on social or political affairs, for glancing at "greater matters," and he soundly rebuffs the theory that the literature represents the original literary endeavors of the rural society it described.

Puttenham discouraged such notions of authenticity but recognized at the same time that the pastoral's ability to keep one eye trained on the realistic, particularized landscape and one on the idealized vista of a better world represented the genre's most compelling feature. He does not banish the English and European disciples of Virgil to a charmed pleasance; he argues that the countryside, with all of its trappings and accoutennents, provides the writer with a vehicle for glancing at matters beyond its immediate purview. Puttenham's elaborate refutations were designed precisely to emphasize the artifice of the genre, to prevent the sixteenth-century reader from viewing the pastoral as a piece of sociological field work. By the eighteenth century, pastoral poets had become so dependent on this same literary artifice only hinted at by Puttenham that critics were once again correcting abuses. When shepherds debate foreign policy, they argued, readers are asked to suspend their disbelief beyond credibility.

The idea of credibility, in one guise or another, has informed both the major critiques and the persuasive examples of pastoral literature from Puttenham's time to the present. One luminous example chosen from the imposing body of critical material demonstrates how thoroughgoing was this corrosive worry over the shepherd's life in the hills and the accuracy of its representation in the work of art. The sophistication of an articulate shepherd has historically been one of the least tolerated sophistications in English writing, and Dr. Johnson's diatribe on "Lycidas," that "easy, vulgar" poem, is one of the most infamous attacks in the critical canon. Continually, the pastoral has confronted the accusations of debunking realists, and the confrontation emphasizes the curiously large degree of social responsibility and realism—the literary device most often associated with social responsibility—expected of the pastoral author. Johnson, though not one of the early commentators, neatly and caustically speaks for the many doubters who preceded him:

It is therefore improper to give the title of a pastoral to verses in which the speakers, after the slight mention of their flocks, fall to complaints of errors in the church and corruptions in the government, or to lamentations of the death of some illustrious person, whom when once the poet has called a shepherd, he has no longer any labour upon his hands, but can make the clouds weep, and lilies wither, and the sheep hang their heads, without art or learning, genius, or study.

Nothing is so tiringly conventional as an insignificant pastoral, and even those writers most invigorated by its formal strictures seem wary of the living shepherd who wearily follows his sheep from grazing to grazing. The eighteenth century, remarkable in this context because it was the last era to view the composition of the pastoral as an ordinary poetic enterprise, abounds with theoretical writing on the subject. Pope, for example, cared nothing for tooth and claw, and his comments on the pastoral portray a writer aware of the fact that shepherds named Corydon, wandering through an anglicized Arcadia, do not face the hardships of shepherds named Michael who move stones at Grasmere. That Pope would even respond to such an obvious assertion emphasizes how enduring this concern for authenticity and credibility had become for both critics and poets alike. In his "Discourse on Pastoral Poetry," he states baldly that the work of the pastoral poet lies "in exposing the best side only of a shepherd's life, and in concealing its miseries." Although not all early pastoral writers had been so idealistic—not Spenser, for example, in "January," from The Shepheardes Calender—Pope's position represents the purest excrescence of pastoral theory, emphasizing its power to idealize but ignoring its tendency to recognize the quotidian reality and its attendant miseries.

Extremity in religion and literature breeds heresy, and when Pope claimed that two and only two of Virgil's Eclogues were truly pastoral works, he showed how exhausted traditions end in denial. Although Johnson, on the other hand, does not suggest that the poet dwell on miseries, he clearly presses for a measure of credibility. This represents a significant shift in emphasis. By attacking several glamorous abuses of pastoral writing, he makes us suspicious of it all. Johnson's strictures, unlike Pope's, are less definitive and more hopeful.

Johnson's witty assessment was prompted by his own famous definition of pastoral earlier in the same piece: a "representation of an action or passion by its effects upon a country life." These actions or passions, then, must not be "inconsistent with a country life." It is difficult—and unfair—to guess how Puttenham would have replied to Johnson; the body of material that concerned Puttenham was smaller and more orderly in spirit than the vast and varied pastorals that Johnson read. As the ranks of the literature swelled, encompassing the lyric, the elegy, the romance, and the drama, so too did the definitions. Whereas the critics of Puttenham's time could quibble over the details of a convention, Johnson's age was attempting to reconcile the inconsistencies of a literary behemoth that had begun to violate, transgress, and redefine its traditional boundaries.

Both Puttenham and Johnson were bothered by the issue of credibility, and to justify their anxiety they discovered a reason for it: the language of pastoral was not the authen tic language of the pasture. Literary realism, in nineteenth-century fiction, was most often summoned to correct abuses and reveal hardships, and the pastoral did not escape untainted by this important development. The reformative zeal for authenticity, when it finally evolved as the domineering concern of the poetry, helped to form the characteristic tone of the antipastoral, a relatively modern development of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Crabbe's The Village (1783), for example, intends to indict social injustice by providing "the real picture of the poor…." But this is a literary revolution in its late stages. The beginnings of a healthy skepticism, the first stirrings of a countermovement against the established conventions of pastoral writing, were evident as early as the sixteenth century. From the beginning, the literature developed tactics of diversion and inference that characterize Heaney's development as he consolidates his savvy political voice.

The earliest pastoralists obviously had not seen the stern reprimands handed down by Johnson. Spenser, identified by Puttenham as "that other Gentleman who wrote the late shepheardes Callender," was well aware of the satirical possibilities inherent in one of the most prevalent pastoral conventions, the poet, or in Spenser's version, the knight as shepherd. In book 6, canto 9 of The Faerie Queene, Sir Calidore has arrived in Arcadia and fallen in love with Pastorella; when she proves invulnerable to his knightly charms, he changes his "loftie looke" for the authentic look, the "shepheards weed," and quickly wins her love. Lest this seem too blatantly erotic, the story takes yet another turn. What Pastorella had loved in her lowly shepherd was, in fact, his courteous qualities, shining through the warp and woof of his native flannel. Eventually, blood as well as water seeks its own level: Pastorella was of a pedigree higher than had previously been suspected, so their attraction to each other, in both the environmental and hereditary sense, was a natural one.

The masquerade reveals a more serious aspect of pastoral, one in which Calidore assumes the appearance of a shepherd, traditionally connoting honesty, even gullibility, to further his designs on Pastorella. When Calidore strikes out across the fields with Pastorella on his arm, he is using the pastoral mode literally, in Puttenham's terms, to "insinuate and glance" at other women, and the reader witnesses a convincing demonstration of the pastoral's capacity for deception and subterfuge. Today Irish nationalist dressed in English tweeds roam the streets of London, occasionally lionized by the literary community they oppose, so artful has been their opposition. In 1983, Heaney published a response to his inclusion in an anthology of verse entitled The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry; his rural and "anxious" muse is "roused on her bed among the furze," and his abdication reveals how successful his ruse has been:

This inclination toward subterfuge, which is in turn facilitated by the genre's tendency to cast its characters in deceptively conventional roles, is clearest in Spenser's "Colin Clouts Come Home Again." The poem is organized as a dialogue between Colin Clout, who has just returned from a trip across the sea, and ten shepherds and shepherdesses, who ply him with questions about his traveling partner, his sea voyage, and his visit to the court of Cynthia. The poem details an Irish homecoming, and although Colin's sympathies are not those of a modern Irish nationalist, the poem remains a skillful pastoral rendition of the various skepticisms that historically characterized relations between Ireland and England. Spenser's biography has figured prominently in many interpretations of the work, and commentators have closely examined the various landscapes of the poem, particularly the one portrayed in the myth of Bregog and Mulla (11.104-55). The precise situation of the rivers, the mountain called "Mole … /That walls the Northside of Armulla Dale," and "the ragged mines"—all of these specific geographical details have led critics to believe that the home referred to in the title is indeed Spenser's Cork County estate. And near the end of the poem, when Colin has described the bounties of Cyn thia's court, Thestylis wonders why anyone would return from such a happy place "to this barrein soyle/Where cold and care and penury do dwell" (11.656-57). Colin's answer begins the section on the corruption of the court.

Thestylis's dreary depiction of his homeland has led some critics to speculate on Spenser's happiness in Ireland: perhaps these descriptions represent affective portraits of Spenser's thoughts and feelings while living away from England. But the evaluation of the poem is not solely a matter of biography. Spenser's descriptions, most fruitfully read in the tradition of the perfected landscape, the earthly Eden, incorporate varying levels of particularity and biographical reference within familiar pastoral contexts. Several shepherds, more obviously than others, represent important historical figures; some rivulets more clearly than others portray actual streams.

But the idealized landscapes in Spenser's pastoral poems often show traces of the persistent attention to regional detail that will dominate late twentieth-century poetry. Under the aegis of the pastoral, much of this poetry finds its distant and surprising ancestor. In Heaney's work this persistence in meticulous description is carefully marshaled to transcend its particularity, creating that distinctly pastoral tension between the idealized landscape of the past—the Golden Age—and the realistic depiction of Irish geography, In a poem such as "Anahorish," Heaney imagines that the name itself possesses ineffable powers of cultural sovereignty. Irish place-names in the United Kingdom become for Heaney subversive incantations that both glorify his Celtic lineage and establish its integrity in British Northern Ireland. The poem dexterously appropriates a landscape politically British in its legal demarcation but linguistically Irish in its nomenclature:

My "place of clear water,"
the first hill in the world
where springs washed into
the shiny grass

and darkened cobbles
in the bed of the lane.
Anahorish, soft gradient
of consonant, vowel-meadow,

after-image of lamps
swung through the yards
on winter evenings.
With pails and barrows

those mound-dwellers
go waist-deep in mist
to break the light ice
at wells and dunghills.

The genealogy established here between the people of Heaney's childhood and the "mound dwellers"—they are practically coalesced into one ancestor—lies entrenched beyond the reach of English bloodlines, and the poem combines a quiet celebration of an Irish childhood with a strenuous resistance to cultural hegemony. Within the pastoral context, these often contrary concerns are reconciled.

The allegorical quality of pastoral writing has been a stable part of the tradition since Virgil's time. But the literature carefully discriminates between these conventional references to living people and the broader, less conventional attempt to incorporate into the poetry the specific details of character or landscape that might dissipate the gleaming innocence of the pastoral vision. Accordingly, the matter of poetic diction, whether based on the regional pidgin or the royal parlance, became an important issue in pastoral theory. In The Renewal of Literature, Richard Poirier argues that the "self-analytical mode" of the modernist text instituted a "form of cultural skepticism," which in varying degrees "is to be found earlier on, as in, say, Spenser's transformations of the allegorical tradition…." Following a rapturous description of Cynthia in "Colin Clout Comes Home Again," Cuddy chides Colin for his elevated speech:

The pastoral illusion here is qualified, if slightly so. By reminding Colin that shepherds must use a baser English than the one he has been using, Cuddy does not argue for a dialectal purity but ironically insists on one of the genre's conventions: in essence he reminds Colin of Puttenham's notion that pastoral writers must employ "rude speeches." Governed by this irony, Colin's lofty flights become the unconventional element of the passage. But this insight comes at the end of a circuitous path; the rigidity of the pastoral form has begun to loosen a little, revealing glimpses of the world beyond the pasture.

The subject of poetic diction concerns all poets, but Irish authors have addressed the matter with exceptional vigor, emphasizing the political implications of choosing or ignoring various words and figures of speech. Heaney's etymological interests have occasioned several of his finest poems, but only a few have openly addressed the political questions that confront the Irish writer. From Wintering Out, the first section of "Traditions" states the case succinctly:

Our guttural muse
was bulled long ago
by the alliterative tradition,
her uvula grows

vestigial, forgotten
like the coccyx
or a Brigid's Cross
yellowing in some outhouse

while custom, that "most
sovereign mistress,"
beds us down into
the British Isles.

The feeling of linguistic displacement in the poem is shared by many Irish writers. Tom Paulin, a poet and critic from Belfast who currently resides in England, has argued passionately for the establishment of an Irish English dictionary, finding an analogy in Noah Webster's dictionary and his Dissertations, the treatises that examined the influence of the American language on the country's concepts of nationhood. Such a dictionary in Ireland would have a redemptive effect:

Many words which now appear simply gnarled, or which "make strange" or seem opaque to most readers, would be released into the shaped flow of a new public language…. A confident concept of Irish English would substantially increase the vocabulary and this would invigorate the written language. A language that lives lithely on the tongue ought to be capable of becoming the flexible written instrument of a complete cultural idea.

"A new public language," "a complete cultural idea"—the phrases resonate with a shrewd and subtle republicanism. The dialectal words and rhythms in Heaney's verse, similar to the "rude speeches," those wayward words often labeled "variant" by lexicographers, represent the common inheritance of the Catholic culture of rural Northern Ireland, a culture that from Heaney's standpoint has suffered political displacement. The pastoral, freely admitting allegorical language and implicitly encouraging resistance and deception, allows Heaney to enshrine his culture while fashioning a cogent and subversive response to the problems faced by the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland.

The word "subversive," when used accurately in this context, describes the way in which pastoral writing balances social criticism and aesthetic design. Pastoral poetry had always been used for polemical purposes, and when Milton prefaces "Lycidas" with his announcement that he "by occasion foretells the ruin of our corrupted Clergy," he is working within a well-defined literary tradition of political and religious dissent. Accordingly, the American reader who innocently opens Empson's seminal work on the subject, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), will be surprised to find the first chapter entitled "Proletarian Literature." Empson begins by introducing the subject of "proletarian art" and declares it "important to try and decide what the term might mean…."

His diction alone plays to the political sensibility, a sensibility that will bear fruit when evaluating Heaney's version of pastoral. Aside from several notable examples, academic criticism in America has avoided political engagement, and the shopworn tenets of New Criticism, with their emphasis on poetic form and an ahistorical aesthetic, provide an excellent example. The few critics and poets who undertook the sweeping examinations such engagements required have traditionally earned the unfortunate title "men of letters." Edmund Wilson appears on this role, and, surely, T. S. Eliot.

Yet for the English and Irish critics, raised on the subterfuges of Auden's early poetry, on the volunteer spirit fostered by the Spanish Civil War, and finally on the hardships of a World War fought at home, the political dimension of literature excited a compelling, if sometimes breast-beating, urgency in many of the writers. Empson is always honing his insights into pastoral literature with the gritty observations of a social worker. Although Heaney's verse generally transcends the confinements of the political arena, the confrontations encountered there account for one of the defining strengths of his work and clarify his relation to the pastoral. Here is an example of Empson's method: "Of course there are plenty of skilled workers in England who are proud of their skill, and you can find men of middle age working on farms who say they prefer the country to the town, but anything like what I am trying to call pastoral is a shock to the Englishman who meets it on the Continent." Empson's sociopolitical program always stands as the foil for his brilliance as a literary critic; the work of art, whether Paradise Lost or Alice in Wonderland, always corners his attention. But not all critics so acrobatically walk the fence between facile sloganeering and felicitous phrasing. Other problems associated with the term "pastoral" must be resolved before Heaney's work assumes its rightful place in the tradition.

In a review of The Penguin Anthology of Pastoral Poetry, Heaney summarizes his opinion regarding the modern usage of the word, and if he lacks the accuracy theoreticians might require, he nonetheless reflects a widespread opinion: "'Pastoral' is a term that has been extended by usage until its original meaning has been largely eroded. For example, I have occasionally talked of the countryside where we live in Wicklow as being pastoral rather than rural, trying to impose notions of a beautified landscape on the word, in order to keep 'rural' for the unselfconscious face of raggle-taggle farmland." In most infor mal writing, the word "idyllic" often substitutes for "pas toral"; a cottage in the country might reasonably be described as both "idyllic" and "pastoral" because either word conjures up a similar range of associations. Yet if Heaney seems perfectly suited to be a pastoral poet, why then does he resist—it is as if he were being sentenced—the title "idyllic poet"? The latter phrase assigns him to the charmed existence of "farmer Allan at the farm abode," as Tennyson has it in "Dora," while the former commands for him the integrity of a literary tradition. The term "pastoral," often undefined and inaccurately deployed, commands a general field of reference that seems to describe much of Heaney's early poetry. But the poet's own definition of the term limits its usage: "beautified" will simply not suffice for the frogs in "Death of a Naturalist" with their "blunt heads farting."

Certain themes and literary strategies are native to the pastoral tradition, and their recurrence, with or without the attendant shepherd, shapes the modern pastoral. Perspective, theme, and imagery are the watchwords. In the same review, Heaney continues: "Obviously, we are unlikely to find new poems about shepherds that engage us as fully as 'Lycidas,' but surely the potent dreaming of a Golden Age or the counter-cultural celebration of sim pler life-styles or the nostalgic projection of the garden on childhood are still occasionally continuous with the tradition as it is presented here." Heaney's point is clear. Although much of the traditional machinery of the pastoral—the shepherds, the singing contests, the personification of the natural world in its elegiac posture—fell long ago into a benign disrepair, the desires that fueled the machinery, "the potent dreaming of a Golden Age," remain immediate, vivid, and urgent. John Lynen, in his book on Robert Frost's pastoralism, clarifies the relation between literary convention and pastoral myth, a clarification that succinctly explicates an essential feature of the genre's development:

The conventions are not the true basis of pastoral, but an outgrowth of something deeper and more fundamental. Pastoralism requires an established myth of the rural world, and the conventions gradually developed through tradition belong to the myth of Arcadia. They are formalized symbols whose function is to evoke an imaginative vision of this world. But Arcadia is not the only version of rural life, and it is possible for a poet to write true pastorals within the context of some other mythic rural world.

The work of each author will have its own unique shape, its own version of pastoral. Such freedoms encourage abuses in the literary critic who finds traces of pastoral in any poem, novel, song, or play remotely concerned with the country life. Open doors can lead to indiscrimination, and prolonged, persistent indiscrimination to fatuity and mental flatulence. Andrew Ettin, one of the most recent critics attempting to distill the essence of pastoral writing, offers this insight:

Not all nature writing … is pastoral. What makes a work pastoral are its attitudes toward the natural world and human experience. In pastoral literature, experiences and emotions are contained within finite limits. Those limits are implied by the patterns revealed within the natural world and within the pastoral way of life, consonant with the patterns of the natural world. The containment is necessitated by the fragility or delicacy of the experiences and emotions, or by tension between pastoral and nonpastoral experience.

Ettin shrewdly embraces what others before him have disparaged. Pastoral experience, fragile and delicate, is contained and circumscribed by nonpastoral experience, and the resulting tension between the two worlds characterizes most pastoral literature. When he uses the word "attitudes," he is tipping his hat to another critic whose helpful insights Ettin acknowledges. In his book, Pastoral Forms and Attitudes, Harold Toliver gives us a sound piece of advice for shaping our own attitudes toward the latter-day pastoral. Aside from analyzing the predictable authors such as Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell, and Milton, he includes chapters on Stevens and Bellow. Of his introductory statements, one is worthy of engraving in stone: "Whether or not the texts examined here need all be considered 'pastorals' is not as important finally as our discovering something in them through this lens that would be less noticeable through another. Much of Heaney's poetry is enlarged and clarified through such a lens. His enlargements and clarifications not only situate him in a literary tradition, they reevaluate the literature of that tradition, echoing, as they do, the old forgotten melodies….