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’.

Chapter 3 argues that a particularly powerful ‘legitimising notion’ was that people’s rights, status, and even their ownership of property, derive from the remote past, even if this was often an imagined past. Anglo-Saxon conquest narratives played a very important part in forming an ‘imagined community’, a people’s sense of their common identity, invoked particularly when the country was under threat. The narrative of Gildas’ ‘Downfall of Britain’ recurs throughout the book as legitimising the association of freedom, land, and public obligation.