An extensively revised and expanded edition of a book first published in 1986, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney offers an account and interpretation of thirty years of Heaney’s poetry and criticism, from Death of a Naturalist (1966) to The Spirit Level (1996). Tracing the pattern of Heaney’s alertly self-revising career, Neil Corcoran situates it in various relevant contexts, notably those of modern and contemporary English, Irish and American poetry and the history and politics of Northern Ireland; and he also takes stock of the large and varied critical response to the poet.Corcoran provides in this book a critical study of a major contemporary poet who remains fertile in the discovery of new modes and forms in which a poetry of what he has called ‘redress’ may be written and renewed.