There is a great deal to say about these four poets, and this question might easily form the topic for a book, rather than an answer of a few hundred words.

Yeats and Heaney are both strongly influenced by their Irish heritage, but in quite different ways. Yeats was an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, by outlook if not by birth or fortune. He was attracted to fascism because he thought it might usher in a new golden age of art and culture, and this single point illuminates his literary world and artistic credo. Yeats is concerned primarily with beauty and with various different types of spirituality, and his eccentric political ideas were always motivated by these concerns.

Auden is just as concerned with beauty as Yeats, but he was also more worried about political tyranny. Perhaps no poet has written as brilliantly and bitterly about twentieth-century totalitarianism as Auden. While he certainly thought totalitarianism was the death of art, Auden also loathed it for its own sake and is often an overtly political poet, celebrating freedom and free expression, even in his most personal love lyrics.

Dylan Thomas's poetry is notoriously unclassifiable. He shares Yeats's obsession with word-music, and his early work shows the influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins, though his religious attitudes were less conventional. Dylan Thomas writes a great deal about the cycles of life and the interconnectedness of living things. The aim of his work seems the be to express and celebrate the myriad forms of life.

Seamus Heaney is well-known for his obsession with "bogs and bone," particularly in rural Ireland. He often writes about the connections between poetry and history or archeology, seeing it as one of the must important functions of poetry to uncover and memorialize the past.