Poets as different as Gerard Manley Hopkins, D.H. Lawrence, Robert Frost, Patrick Kavanagh, and Dylan Thomas contributed to the making of Seamus Heaney’s early style, but Robert Lowell was the catalyst transforming those influences into something distinct. Before the transformation occurred, most of Heaney’s poems were derivative. “Song of My Man-Alive,” which he published in a 1961 issue of Gorgon shortly before graduating from Queen’s University, Belfast, demonstrated how his enchantment with another poet’s voice—in this case Dylan Thomas’s—could adulterate his own. Writing about a youthful romance in the country, Heaney sounded as if he were parodying the Welsh bard’s romantic rhetoric:
Author: Henry Hart
Henry Hart is the Hickman Professor of Humanities at the College of William and Mary. Wiley-Blackwell published his Life of Robert Frost in 2017. He has published four poetry books, the most recent being Familiar Ghosts. His poems and essays have appeared in the Southern Review, Agni, Salmagundi, New England Review, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, New Yorker, Poetry, and many other journals. His biography James Dickey: The World as a Lie was runner-up for a Southern Book Critics Circle Award in 2000. He has also published critical books on Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell, and Geoffrey Hill.