‘Seamus Heaney: Poet of Tension or Poet of Conviction?’

Heaney has often been depicted as a writer struggling with the moral and ethical difficulties associated with his identity both as poet and as Nationalist Catholic brought up in Northern Ireland. By showing the limitations of Heaney's more self-consciously troubled and 'political' poetry (in 'North' and 'Station Island', for example), and the strengths of poems that speak more of imaginative convictions (in 'Field Work' and 'Seeing Things'), this essay argues that the poet is at his most convincing when quickened by inspirational intimations rather than tortured by perceived responsibilities