The Government of the Tongue

From the Nobel Prize–winning Irish poet comes a landmark collection of essays scrutinizing the works of his twentieth-century peers from across the globe.

In these critical essays, Seamus Heaney examines the poetry of such masterful figures as Osip Mandelstam, Robert Lowell, Zbigniew Herbert, Sylvia Plath, W. H. Auden, Patrick Kavanagh, Derek Walcott, Elizabeth Bishop, Miroslav Holub, and Philip Larkin. Throughout the collection, Heaney’s gifts as a wise and genial reader are exercised with characteristic exactness, and we are reminded, above all, of the essentially gratifying nature of poetry itself.

“Heaney’s concern to square art with life makes the book a welcome throwback to the essayists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Like Hazlitt or Lamb, Heaney places insightful personal reminiscence alongside literary analysis. The effect is a kind of darting, rolled-sleeve alertness that lets you feel the force of Heaney’s emotional and intellectual life . . . Heaney’s essays on Kavanagh, Lowell, and Plath are as good as his own best poems.” —Tom Sleigh, Boston Review