From his earliest poetry, Heaney used formal linguistic terminology to describe his poetic practice. After Seeing Things, from the point when he developed a stress on the visionary, his linguistic analysis increasingly dwelt on the process by which instinctive observation of objects and experiences underlies language: what he called ‘raids on the prearticulate’. Earlier poems like ‘Alphabets’ described this as a process of education; later poems reverse the process so that existing language is taken back to the unarticulated sentiments and physical realities that underlie it. For Heaney the great image for this is Braille by which material figures work backwards by sensory exploration to the things they represent. He uses it as an image from ‘Bog Queen’ in North to 'At the Wellhead' in Seeing Things.

WHAT EXACTLY ARE we doing when we set out on a translation? Well, it depends; the first thing to establish is for what purpose and readership we are doing it. Since the early nineteenth century when there was a reinforced emphasis on the theory of translation in works such as Friedrich Schleiermacher's ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’ it has been essential for translators to recognise precisely what kind of version they were aiming at – most immediately whether the objective was correspondence to the original in a new language (what degree of ‘equivalence’ we are aiming at, in Lawrence Venuti's terms), or to produce a new work which was prompted by the original. Not that such considerations were new in the nineteenth century: in the Alfredian Preface to the Anglo-Saxon translation of Gregory's Cura Pastoralis the translator will proceed ‘hwilum word be worde, hwilum andgit of andgiete’ (‘sometimes word for word; sometimes sense for sense’). And of course there are other contexts too: in her very enlightening essay on Borges here, M. J. Toswell refers to Umberto Eco's summary idea of ‘translation as a negotiation involving original text, publisher, economic matters, the target text, various kinds of approaches to the translation and reader responses’.

Not all of these factors are the primary concern for the context here. In her essay on translations of Old English poetry into Modern English and Russian, Inna Matyushina reminds us of a crucial distinction: ‘Translation has traditionally been divided into two types: that on a spatial axis, from one language to another, and that on a chronological axis, within one language of different periods.’ The chronological axis of course is fundamental for translations of Old English to modern – the sole concern of four of the twelve essays here – as it is also for the two essays concerned with translations of early Irish texts into modern languages: Irish in the case of Tadhg Ó Siocháin and English by Lahney Preston Matto. A substantial part of what verse translators do is the recasting of earlier texts in their own language.

The eald languages in the twelve essays here are Old English, Old Norse, and Middle Irish. The ‘new’ languages are Modern English, Modern Irish, Spanish, Scots and Russian, so this is not only a matter of chronological translation.

Since the late eighteenth century and the onset of Romanticism in England, interest in Anglo-Saxon culture has grown steadily, through academic investigation, myth-making, translation, and popular culture, up to the extraordinary success of Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf in 1999, and beyond into the twenty-first century. There has, too, been a developing scholarly interest in the theory of ‘Medievalism’, in studies by Michael Alexander and others. Heaney's translation echoed that, but was also the culmination of an insistent Old English presence in his poetry ever since North in 1975; the whole myth of the ‘Bog People’ that was the vivifying strand in his North and Wintering Out is founded in the northern past. Amongst modern poets, even before North, Geoffrey Hill in 1971 had taken the title of a ground-breaking book from a time-honoured item in Sweet's Reader, ‘Mercian Hymns’. Earlier again, Anglo-Saxon poetry was firmly installed in the modern pantheon by Pound and Auden, whose versions of ‘The Seafarer’ and ‘The Wanderer’ respectively never lost their grip on the poetic imagination in English.

Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, then, is responding crucially to the spirit of its moment, and of other moments of intersection between past and present. The book is in part the product of a very successful and crowded conference under the title Bone Dreams (derived from Heaney's poem of that title in North), held at the Faculty of English in Oxford University on Saturday 26 April 2008. The conference was organized by the present editors, and it brought together an enthusiastic gathering of students, writers and academics in lively debate. A glance at the contents of the book makes it clear how wide-ranging the recent influence of Old English has been: on the poetry of Heaney, Hill, Basil Bunting, Ted Hughes, and Peter Reading, but also extending to P.D. James's crime fiction as well as to children's literature, comics, opera, and the cinema. The line back to the Modernists is traced here too, in chapters on David Jones and W.H. Auden. Beowulf bulks large in all of this but it is not on its own.

In pondering the relative familiarity of the classical heritage and the Anglo-Saxon past, Heaney said memorably in the introduction to his Beowulf translation that ‘Achilles rings a bell, but not Scyld Scēfing.’ The evidence of this book is that this is becoming less true.

Old English poetry is a somewhat improbable recent success story, in an era when formal study of classical literature and even the study of modern languages have been in decline in England. The most prominent success was Seamus Heaney’s verse translation of Beowulf in 1999, a volume which won prizes in competition not only with other poetry books but with books in all literary categories. Important as the positive reception of Heaney’s marvellous translation was, it was not a sole cause of the new popularity of Old English poetry. His book was also a confirmation of the popularity of this poetry with English poets dating back to the Victorian period and strengthening amongst Modernist poets in the earlier twentieth century. Heaney’s predecessors here include Longfellow, Hopkins, Auden, Pound and Edwin Morgan. Some Old English poems, such as The Wanderer, The Seafarer and Wulf and Eadwacer are amongst the most widely translated items in the twentieth century. There have been a number of attempts to identify what quality it was that commended these poems so much to the modern taste, in particular to that of the Modernists; a recurrent phrase is ‘the power of the half-stated’. Auden’s enthusiasm is much quoted: ‘I was spellbound. This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish … Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry have been one of my strongest, most lasting influences.’ In the main part of this essay I want to concentrate on what Auden might mean by ‘influences’, trying to describe what qualities in Old English poetry were found useful and expressive for writers in English of later periods.

When Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, the citation famously paid tribute to his combination of ‘lyrical beauty and ethical depth which exalt everyday miracles and the living past’. This captures with remarkable economy not only Heaney’s pre-eminent strengths, but also the two imperatives between which his own commentary and the criticism of him have fluctuated. In the Preface to Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 Heaney described the choice between the ethical and the aesthetic again, quoting from his Foreword to the prose collection Preoccupations in 1980: ‘How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to be to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and his contemporary world?’ By quoting the earlier Foreword verbatim, Heaney was making it clear that his abiding concerns have remained unchanged.

The Nobel citation also summarises the issues that this book aims to account for. Heaney’s most recent collection of poems District and Circle (2006) – and Heaney’s titles are carefully considered, as Rand Brandes’s essay here shows – marks a point, forty years on from his first full-length volume Death of a Naturalist, at which he circles back to the local district in which that highly localised volume was placed. In those forty years Heaney has published at least twelve major individual volumes of poems, three series of Selected Poems, several dramatic translations and a large body of critical prose. Not surprisingly, taking stock is not a simple matter: by now, in 2008, there is a very considerable bibliography on him to account for, as well as his own works, and several critical approaches of varying schools of thought and degrees of approval.

In the best recent book on Irish literature and Greek tragedy, Marianne McDonald observes that in many ways Ireland ‘is constructing its identity through the representations offered by Greek tragedy’. It is clear that this remark applies to Seamus Heaney at least as much as to any other writer in the modern Irish tradition, and his use of Greek tragedy has received a good deal of comment. In this chapter I want to consider, in dealing with Heaney’s relationship with classical literature, two sustained, and recently reinforced, elements in his poetry, and the relations between them. The first is the use of the pastoral in his writing, whatever term we choose to describe it: pastoral, anti-pastoral, bucolic, eclogue, Doric. The second is to see this in the context of his turning to the classics in his writing generally, and his purposes in doing so. I want to suggest that there is surprisingly little difference in the use he makes of tragedy and of other classical genres: all genres (and the pastoral is the most prominent) turn tragic in his hands, largely as a consequence of the public circumstances of his lifetime.

The Latin and Greek classics have been a constant presence in Heaney’s poetry throughout his writing lifetime: Hercules and Antaeus, Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Antigone, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the Virgilian Golden Bough, Narcissus, Hermes, more recently Horace. As a poet of the modernist tradition Heaney has a gift for incorporating a classical mythological figure into his own world; for example, the poet remembers his father’s advice to his daughter when she was going by ferry to England: ‘look for a man with an ashplant on the boat’ (ST 85). She would be safe next to a cattle-dealer like himself; but of course this character is also Hermes, the figure of ‘The Stone Verdict’ (HL 17). The list of Heaney’s classical usages is very extensive.

In a note to his play At the Hawk's Well in 1916, Yeats said “I need a theatre; I believe myself to be a dramatist” (VPl415). T. S. Eliot declared in his 1940 anniversary lecture on Yeats: “I do not know where our debt to him as a dramatist ends - and in time, it will not end until that drama itself ends.” Yet, putting it at its most positive, there can be few major dramatists about whose standing there is so little critical consensus as Yeats. He was a prolific writer of plays throughout his life; only Shaw, of the major playwrights in English of his time, wrote more. His earliest writings are dramatic, from the “Arcadian play” The Island of Statues in 1885 onwards, and in the late 1880s he is already discussing with George Russell and John O'Leary the possibility of writing poetic drama. Throughout his life he described his literary achievements in terms of the dramatic. Yet from the first his plays had at best an uncertain critical reception. Moreover, it was an uncertainty with which Yeats himself seemed to be in sympathy, to judge from what he says about the stage in his great, career summarizing late poem “The Circus Animals' Desertion.” After mentioning his early (and favorite) play The Countess Cathleen, the poem concludes by expressing reservations about his involvement with drama as a whole: “Players and painted stage took all my love, / And not those things that they were emblems of” (VP630). This final judgement recorded in the poetry seems to be that Yeats's creative career lost its way through concern with the stage: an impression seemingly confirmed in the poem's familiar last stanza, which advocates a return to “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart,” implicitly leaving aside all theatrical effects. It is a return to an old theme: at earlier moments of disillusion Yeats had expressed the same regrets, as in “The Fascination of What's Difficult” in the Green Helmet volume (1910), written at the height of his most concentrated involvement in “theatre business” (VP260) and partly motivated by such events as the negative audience response to Synge's The Playboy of the Western World at the Abbey Theatre in 1907.

In the most important anthology of the later Middle English secular lyrics, Rossell Hope Robbins's Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, the opening category, ‘Popular Songs’, contains a poem headed by Robbins ‘Abuse of Women’ which has the following epigraph as its burden:

It seems strange at first glance to assign this poem in carol form to the ‘popular’ class; not only does its two-line burden contain a line of Latin but, moreover, this is a line which operates here as what Robbins neatly calls ‘the destroying burden’. Surely such features must relate to a learned tradition of satire, of the kind associated with the goliardic Latin poets of the High Middle Ages such as Walter of Châtillon. So what exactly does ‘popular’ mean in this context?

In the criticism of the Middle English lyrics which followed the pioneering editions by Brown and Robbins and the other canon-forming anthologies listed on the first page of Preston's Concordance, a good deal of the scholarly energy was expended on classification along these lines. The fundamental division, which has on the whole proved the most serviceable, is into ‘religious’ and ‘secular’. The second commonest division in those early discussions – one which cut across the religious-secular – was into ‘popular’ and ‘courtly’; indeed, despite the prior assortment of the field into ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ in the Oxford anthologies edited by himself and Carleton Brown, Robbins makes this categorisation even more fundamental: ‘These are the two big sub-divisions of Middle English poetry, the courtly and the popular – reflecting the stratification of medieval society’ (Robbins Sec., xxxiii). The alternative to ‘popular’ was not always ‘courtly’; sometimes it was something like ‘literary’ or ‘artistic’ or ‘sophisticated’ – but a division of which one pole was the ‘popular’ has come to seem indispensable.

Under scrutiny, however, the term ‘popular’ proves much more equivocal than might be expected. For one thing, though Robbins's ‘stratification of medieval society’ is a suggestive idea in this context, it has not been much pursued, even in his own introduction. Again, a quite different sense of the word had been employed in one of the most influential early discussions, the essay called ‘Some Aspects of Mediaeval Lyric’ appended by Chambers and Sidgwick to their attractive 1907 anthology, Early English Lyrics.

To give an account of poetry in modern Ireland is not an entirely straightforward matter, for several reasons. To begin with the most obvious, using the title 'Poetry in Ireland' rather than 'Irish Poetry' sidesteps a vital issue. Since the Middle Ages, poetry has been written on the island in both Irish and English. Recently there has been some dispute over whether the poetry in the two languages can sensibly be seen as a single entity at all, as 'Irish Poetry'. The classic claim in favour of such a shared poetic tradition was made by Thomas Kinsella, both in his book The Dual Tradition, and in the introduction to his New Oxford Book of Irish Verse in 1986: