Logan on Heaney

Yet another link in the chain of Heaney reviews appeared this Sunday. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, William Logan analyzed the older poet's Human Chain, comparing the Irishman to Frost:

Heaney is the most popular literary poet since Frost, who managed to convince most of his readers that he wasn’t a literary poet at all, that he booted up ­poems while mucking out a spring or driving a buggy — and perhaps, in a way, he did. Readers often love in Heaney what they loved in Frost, the unassumed and unassuming wisdom. Heaney has rubbed shoulders, as Frost did, with some of the most important literary figures of his day; Heaney has spent a long share of nights in hotels and on the road, as Frost did; yet often they write as if, just out the window, the cows were bawling to be milked and the first green shoots were sprouting in the fields — and as if neither man had spent more nights in a hotel than the Queen of Sheba.

Logan finishes with a frank, yet not ungenerous, evaluation of Heaney's poems and position.

For decades Heaney has been a model citizen in the state of literature. He has produced useful translations (most popularly of “Beowulf,” a best seller), idiosyncratic anthologies, a respectable body of criticism and, every few years, a new book of poems. He’s unlikely to be remembered for more than the poems, and among the poems unlikely to be remembered for much written in the past 10 or 20 years.

And that's partly because of the attention Heaney has received -- an attention itself reminiscent of Frost.

There’s a state of innocence poets need, a state hard to reach when they’ve been frog-marched out of paradise to the memorial dinners and honorary degrees of experience. Many of Heaney’s new ­poems start with the old flair and dash, but after a few lines they lose their way and sputter out. The late work has been solid, composed to a high level of craftsmanship; but the poems are like footnotes to poems already written, with all of his mastery but little of his passion and less of his subdued outrage. They become that evil thing, ­poems written for the sake of writing poems.