Excepting perhaps primitive or infantile wordplay, protective or playful, such as that with which Baby Tuckoo opens Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, we might say no one has written a solitary poem. Poems arrive in the context of other poems read or written by the poet, and by other poets of his or her region, sect, nation or globe. These contexts may even be arranged hierarchically, as the slightly older Baby Tuckoo does on the flyleaf of his geography book when he identifies himself as the young ‘Stephen Dedalus / Class of Elements / Clongowes Wood College / Sallins / County Kildare / Ireland / Europe / The World / The Universe’, although he might add a temporal scale to situate himself in other periods in the poet’s life or relate him to other epochs or centuries. For various reasons critics of the poet Seamus Heaney have often limited the context for his poems, interrupting these concentric poetic circles in which we might read him after ‘Seamus Heaney / Belfast / Ulster’, perhaps because, as with young Stephen, ‘It made [them] very tired to think that way.’

For example, Neil Corcoran, one of Seamus Heaney’s most perceptive critics, has published a study entitled Poets of Modern Ireland (1999), in which, in his six chapters on living poets, he has only included Heaney and other poets who emerged in the sixties from what is called ‘the Belfast Group’, with no living poets from the Republic of Ireland. We can understand readers’ fascination with a group of talented poets – including in this case Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, Seamus Deane and, a little later, Tom Paulin, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon and Frank Ormsby – emerging at one time and in one place, and such a fascination is compounded when this talent, like that of poets of the First World War or of the English Civil War, appears during a political crisis and violent upheaval which seems to enlarge these poets’ role and impose a common tragic topic. Nevertheless, because reading Heaney in relation to the Group preoccupies mostly English critics, such criticism can be seen as having exclusionary and even Unionist intentions. Heaney, himself, in an essay on ‘Vision and Irony in Recent Irish Poetry’, has included only contemporary Ulster poets.