This chapter provides an account of the georgic in modern and contemporary poetry. It begins by illuminating the georgic qualities, however implicit or accidental, in Ted Hughes’s Moortown Diary, and proceeds to trace the influence of Hughes’s farming poems on the work of his literary contemporaries and successors, including poets such as Geoffrey Hill, Alice Oswald and Sean Borodale. Locating the georgic in the margins and tattered edges of poems – and the working landscapes they describe – it argues that the agricultural and horticultural poetry of these writers represents if not a georgic revival then at least evidence of its survival in the wake of profound changes in agriculture and the British countryside. The particular strain of the georgic that is sustained by these poets is characterised by a documentary style which remains alive to the haphazard circumstances of outdoor work – a style which is as adaptable as it is enduring.

No translation can ever be the same as its original, but rather than seeing this in terms of a loss, it makes far more sense to think in terms of gain, for once a translation enters the receiving culture it sets out on a new path. Never is this clearer than in the practice of retranslating classical texts. The Iliad may have begun as an oral poem, but over the ages it has become a source for writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, filmmakers, video game creators, graphic artists – in short for creative artists across the world – and has consequently acquired new life in new languages and new forms. In the great interconnectedness of global textuality, the role played by translation, however we choose to define that term, is infinite.

Seamus Heaney had a complex relationship with English poetry. While Heaney’s essays on the canon of English poetry have preoccupied critics, this chapter looks at the ways in which his poems engage with English places and poets, as settings and exemplars. It then shows how he presents himself as both inheritor of a tradition and critical outsider, especially in his translation of Beowulf, and argues that his example has been central to similar translation projects by younger generations of English poets, including Simon Armitage and Alice Oswald. The chapter concludes by looking at the more global, cosmopolitan context Heaney envisages for his England-set later poems like ‘District and Circle’ and ‘Eelworks’.