Each chapter focuses on a single theme, such as: his sense of the aesthetic; his relationship with politics; his notion of place; his enunciation of a sense of visceral identity; his concept of ethics in terms of a relationship between selfhood and alterity; and his notion of the many threads which combine to produce a sense of Irishness. Finally the Nobel lectures of Yeats and Heaney are examined in order to trace the complex relationship between these two writers.