In recent years Seamus Heaney has earned the reputation of being 'the most important Irish poet since Yeats'. Blake Morrison, in the first serious study of his career to date, identifies the central characteristics of his achievement, uncovering the sources of his poems, placing his work within both Irish and Anglo-American traditions and explaining his poetry's complex relation to the current political troubles in Northern Ireland. A lively, personal account by a writer who is himself a poet and critic, this book challenges some of the myths surrounding Heaney's work and places it in proper perspective.