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Terence Brown ends his critical biography of Yeats with a chapter on his ‘afterlife’, an account of the various ways in which his work survives in subsequent writing. He says there that Seamus Heaney ‘has engaged as critic with the poetic achievement of Yeats more fully than any other Irish poet since MacNeice’ – who published the first critical book on Yeats in 1941. In fact, Heaney’s writings on Yeats to date would almost make a book too – relatively slim, but intellectually substantial. These are also usually instances of Heaney at his best as a critic, provoked into some of his most alert and challenged acts of attention.

A collection of Heaney on Yeats would begin with two essays of 1978. One, ‘The Makings of a Music: Reflections on Wordsworth and Yeats’, sustains a contrast between a poetry of ‘surrender’ and a poetry of ‘discipline’. The other, ‘Yeats as an Example?’, adds a question mark to the title of an essay by W. H. Auden to suggest how deeply problematic a figure Yeats is for Heaney. ‘Yeats as an Example?’ is central to my sense of this relationship, and I shall return to it shortly. Other essays would include the uncollected ‘A Tale of Two Islands: Reflections on the Irish Literary Revival’, published in 1980, in which the Protestant Anglo-Irish Yeats is compared with the nineteenth-century Catholic apostate novelist William Carleton. Then there is an essay of 1988, ‘The Place of Writing: W. B. Yeats and Thoor Ballylee’, in which Heaney meditates on the various meanings of the Norman tower in the West of Ireland in which Yeats lived for a few years, and which he figured extensively in his poetry. The essay is one of three – the others are frequently allusive to Yeats too – which made a short book, also called The Place of Writing, published in the United States in 1988, excerpts from which were reprinted in the prose collection Finders Keepers in 2002.