Intriguing issues relating to the workings of canonicity in contemporary writing surround Seamus Heaney’s swift rise to international prominence in the 1970s and his increasing eminence in anglophone poetry worldwide in subsequent decades. In the poet’s own generation, the congruence of wide popularity and critical acclaim has perhaps a readier parallel in mass culture (the Beatles and Bob Dylan) than in literature. Of twentieth-century poets about the scale of whose achievement there is something approaching consensus, only the ultra-canonical Yeats, Eliot and Auden have enjoyed the sort of High Street profile that brought Heaney’s Beowulf and District and Circle into the hardback non-fiction best-seller lists in Britain. The contrast with the fortunes of the majority of leading figures in the modern pantheon is striking. For all the reverence their verse has received from critics and fellow-practitioners, writers even of the stature of Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop have remained more or less invisible to a non-specialist readership. And very few of the poets who have, like Heaney, made it into the Sunday supplements and the public consciousness have been given a welcome comparable to his in the academy. Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath all won wide audiences for their work but Frost’s academic reputation is mainly posthumous, Thomas’s currently in abeyance, Hughes’s uncertain and Plath’s dependent on a handful of poems written at the end of her tragically abbreviated life. While not inconsiderable, the varieties of official recognition granted to Frost (who in his eighty-seventh year made a celebrated, wind-blown appearance at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration) and Hughes (who accepted and invigorated the poet laureateship of England) look national rather than global when set against the example of a poet who has occupied simultaneously the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard and the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford, has been awarded innumerable honorary degrees, has performed at the ceremony marking the 2004 expansion of the European Union and has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Even among the five English-language poetic beneficiaries of what Yeats called the bounty of Sweden, Heaney cuts a singular figure. Neither the imperialist Rudyard Kipling nor his post-colonial polar twin Derek Walcott ever looked out on the world from an established canonical niche; austere and forbidding, the public personae cultivated by W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot were continuous with the stubbornly anti-democratic values promoted by their art.